Need a hand?
Support runs 8:00 AM to 12:00 AM ET, 7 days a week. Average reply time is under 10 minutes.
support@iptvhub.caWhat reselling IPTV in Canada actually involves: the credit economics, realistic margins, the support workload nobody warns you about, and the tax and legal obligations that come with running a business.
Reselling IPTV is presented online as passive income. It is not. It is a small service business with real customers who message you at ten on a Saturday night when a stream stutters.
Done with open eyes it can work well, particularly alongside an existing business that already has the right customers. Done on the promise of easy money it usually lasts four months. This article is the version we wish more people read before applying.
The unit is a credit. One credit creates or renews one month of one connection.
A customer buying a six-month, two-connection plan consumes twelve credits. A customer on a twelve-month single-connection plan consumes twelve. Credits do not expire, so you can buy at whatever volume you can afford and draw them down over time rather than committing to a monthly quota.
Our wholesale rates run from $9 CAD per credit at the entry tier down to $6 at 500 credits. Full detail is on the reseller page.
Assume the middle tier at $7.50 per credit, and that you retail at $20 CAD per connection per month, which is roughly the Canadian market rate.
| Customers | Credit cost | Revenue | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 lines/month | $75 | $200 | $125 |
| 25 lines/month | $188 | $500 | $312 |
| 50 lines/month | $375 | $1,000 | $625 |
| 100 lines/month | $750 | $2,000 | $1,250 |
| 250 lines/month | $1,875 | $5,000 | $3,125 |
Those are gross margins, not profit. What they exclude is covered below, and it is the part that determines whether this is worth doing.
Your time. This is the real constraint, and it binds long before the credit cost does. Budget roughly ten to fifteen minutes per customer per month across setup, questions and renewals. At 100 customers that is twenty to twenty-five hours a month, most of it in evenings, because that is when people watch television and notice problems.
Payment processing. Card fees run around 2.9% plus a fixed amount per transaction. On a $20 sale that is meaningful.
Churn. Expect to lose somewhere between five and fifteen percent of customers a month, higher in the first few months of a customer's life. Replacing them is acquisition work, which is more time.
Acquisition cost. If you advertise, that comes off the margin. If you rely on word of mouth, growth is slower but the customers are usually better.
Tax. Income from this is taxable. Once you pass the small supplier threshold you must register for and collect GST or HST. That is a real obligation, not an optional one, and the Canada Revenue Agency's guidance is the place to start rather than a forum post.
Bad debt and chargebacks. Occasional, and each one costs you the credit as well as the revenue.
A realistic net margin, after all of that, is closer to forty to fifty percent of the gross figure above than to a hundred.
The resellers who succeed almost all have something in common: they already had the customers.
It works well if you run a phone shop, a computer repair business or a television installation service, and already have people asking you for recommendations. If you have a community network that trusts you on technology. If you are genuinely comfortable talking someone through a setup on the phone. If you can commit to answering messages most evenings. And if you understand your provincial business registration and tax obligations, or will pay an accountant who does.
Look elsewhere if you are expecting income that requires no ongoing work, do not want to handle customer support yourself, are not prepared to register a business properly, intend to advertise in ways that misrepresent what the service is, or want a guarantee of a customer base. We cannot provide the last one and neither can anyone else.
This is the part that surprises people, so here it is plainly.
You are your customers' first line of support. That is what your margin pays for. In practice the split works like this:
You handle: setup and installation, app questions, login problems, billing, renewals, explaining why a connection is not a device limit, and the sixteenth person this month whose television is on the wrong input.
We handle: anything infrastructural. Moving a line to a different server node, re-sourcing a channel that has failed, resetting a stuck connection count, and platform-level faults.
The practical consequence is that roughly nine support messages in ten come to you, not us. Most are simple, and most arrive in the evening. Our support centre covers the common issues, and pointing customers at it directly is the single most effective way to reduce your own workload.
We take no view on what you charge and we do not enforce a minimum. We also do not undercut you on your own customers.
Most Canadian resellers price between $15 and $25 CAD per connection per month. Below $15 the margin does not justify the support time. Above $25 you are competing with providers who sell direct and publish their pricing, which is a difficult position without a clear differentiator.
The successful resellers we see rarely compete on price. They compete on being the person who comes to your house and sets it up, or the shop you can walk into. That is worth a premium and it is defensible in a way that price is not.
Read this part carefully rather than skimming it.
Resellers are independent businesses, not our agents or employees. You are responsible for your own business registration, your own tax obligations, your own customer contracts and your own compliance with the laws of your province and of Canada.
That last point matters more here than for a subscriber. Canadian copyright enforcement has consistently focused on the distribution side rather than on individual viewers, and reselling puts you on the distribution side. Our article on whether IPTV is legal in Canada sets out the landscape, including the site-blocking orders and the actions taken against operators and resellers.
We would say plainly: take independent legal and accounting advice before starting. Not because we are discouraging you, but because "I read an article" is not a position you want to be in if a question ever arises. We decline applications that suggest an account would be operated unlawfully, and we terminate accounts where that turns out to be the case.
Our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy govern the relationship, and both are worth reading in full before applying.
If you have read all of the above and still want to:
Start small. Twenty-five credits, not five hundred. Find out whether you enjoy the support work before optimising the credit rate.
Pick a niche. A community, a language group, a neighbourhood, or an existing customer base. General-audience reselling against providers who sell direct is hard.
Use trials aggressively. The control panel lets you generate 24-hour trials. A prospect who has watched a full evening on their own television converts far better than one reading a description.
Write your own setup guide. For the one device most of your customers use. It will save you more time than anything else you do.
Register the business and talk to an accountant before you have fifty customers, not after.
Applications are reviewed manually, usually within one business day. Tell us roughly what you have in mind: any existing business, how many customers you expect in the first few months, and which tier interests you. We are not looking for a business plan, just enough to know you are serious.
The reseller page has the credit tiers, what the control panel does, and the application form.
Filed under
Marc Delaney
Head of Canadian Operations
Marc has spent eleven years in Canadian broadcast and streaming distribution, including six at a national cable operator. He writes about the economics of Canadian television and why it costs what it does.
The free 24-hour trial carries the complete channel lineup and the full on-demand library, with no credit card and no commitment. Plans start at $19.99 CAD.