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support@iptvhub.caEvery term you will meet while researching or setting up IPTV, explained without jargon. If a definition here still leaves you unsure, our support desk will answer directly.
A game withheld in your region because someone else holds the local broadcast rights.
When a broadcaster holds exclusive regional rights to a team, other feeds carrying the same game are blocked in that territory. Official broadcaster apps enforce blackouts exactly as cable does. The practical consequence is that having the right regional feed matters far more than having a large channel count.
The ability to go back and watch something that already aired, without having recorded it.
Catch-up recording runs continuously on the major channels, letting you go back up to seven days. There is nothing to schedule and nothing to set. It differs from a PVR in that the recording happens on the server side for everyone, rather than on a box in your living room for you alone.
The on-screen programme guide showing what is on now and next.
The Electronic Programme Guide is the grid of listings you scroll through. It arrives as an XMLTV file that your player downloads separately from the channels themselves, which is why the guide can be empty while the channels work fine. On first launch it takes two to three minutes to download, and closing the app partway through leaves it blank. It refreshes automatically every 24 hours after that.
Television delivered over an internet connection rather than a coaxial cable or a satellite dish.
IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. The name describes the delivery mechanism, not the content. Traditional cable pushes every channel down a coaxial line and your box tunes to one of them. IPTV sends only the channel you asked for, as a video stream, over the same broadband connection you already use for everything else. Every mainstream streaming platform works this way; the difference with an IPTV subscription is that it carries live linear channels with a programme guide rather than only on-demand files.
The Canadian system where a rights holder's complaint is forwarded to you by your ISP.
Under sections 41.25 and 41.26 of the Copyright Act, a rights holder who identifies alleged infringement sends a notice to the internet service provider, which forwards it to the subscriber and keeps records. Your ISP does not disclose your identity, does not terminate your service and does not levy a penalty. Since 2018 a notice may not lawfully contain a settlement demand. For a viewer, receiving one is a letter, not a lawsuit.
A version of a sports channel carrying the game relevant to your part of the country.
Canadian sports rights are sold by territory, so one sports network runs separate Eastern, Ontario, Western and Pacific feeds, and its competitor runs five of its own. Which one carries your team on a given night depends on where you live. A provider that supplies a single generic national feed will show you a blackout screen or the wrong game several nights a week, which is why we carry every regional feed separately.
The on-demand library of films and series, as opposed to live channels.
Video on Demand is content you start whenever you like, rather than content running to a schedule. Our library holds roughly 45,000 films and 45,000 series episodes, organised by genre, year and language, with series arranged into proper seasons rather than a flat list of files.
How much data a stream uses per second. Higher bitrate means more detail.
Measured in megabits per second. Resolution tells you the pixel count; bitrate tells you how much information describes those pixels. A 4K stream at a low bitrate can look worse than a well-encoded Full HD one, particularly on fast motion like hockey, where a starved bitrate produces blocky artefacts around the puck. Our streams run from roughly 1.5 Mbps for SD up to 25 Mbps for 4K.
A few seconds of video held in memory ahead of playback, to absorb network hiccups.
Your player downloads slightly ahead of what you are watching and holds it in memory. If the network stumbles briefly, playback continues from the buffer instead of stopping. Default buffer settings are often one second, which is too aggressive for a residential connection. Raising it to three to five seconds costs you a moment when changing channels and eliminates most buffering complaints.
A modern video codec that delivers the same quality as its predecessor at roughly half the bitrate.
High Efficiency Video Coding, also called H.265, is what makes 4K streaming practical over ordinary home connections. The trade-off is that it takes more processing power to decode, which is why cheap or older streaming devices stutter on 4K channels while handling Full HD fine. If a device struggles, the fix is usually to enable hardware decoding in the player settings, or to drop to the Full HD variant of the same channel.
A plain-text playlist format that lists channel names and stream URLs.
An M3U file is the simplest way to hand a channel list to a player. It works almost everywhere, but it carries no programme guide data on its own, which is why people who log in with an M3U URL often report a blank guide. Where your player supports it, the Xtream Codes login is the better choice because it pulls channels and guide together.
A dedicated device that sits under the television and decodes the stream.
In the IPTV context this usually means a purpose-built receiver that behaves like a traditional cable box: you enter a portal address once and then it is just a remote with numbered channels. These suit less technical households far better than app-based setups, because there is no login screen to navigate and nothing to sideload.
Installing an app from outside a device's official store.
Some platforms do not carry IPTV players in their own store, so the app is installed from a downloaded installer file instead. On Fire TV this means enabling Apps from Unknown Sources and using the Downloader utility. It is a standard, supported feature of the operating system, not a modification of the device. Some platforms, notably Roku, do not permit it at all, which is why our support there is weaker.
A login method that supplies channels, on-demand content and the programme guide in one step.
Rather than pasting a playlist URL, you enter a server address, a username and a password. The player then queries the server for the live channel list, the on-demand library and the programme guide. This is the login method we recommend wherever the app offers it, and choosing the M3U option instead is the most common cause of a missing guide.
The less congested of the two common Wi-Fi bands, and the one you want for streaming.
The 2.4 GHz band has only three non-overlapping channels and is shared with microwaves, cordless phones and every neighbouring network. In a dense apartment building you may be competing with forty other networks. The 5 GHz band has far more channels and shorter range, which indoors is an advantage because your neighbours' signals do not reach you. Moving a streaming device to 5 GHz is the single highest-yield buffering fix.
Distributing channels across many servers so one overloaded machine cannot freeze your stream.
Cheap services run a handful of oversubscribed servers, which is why they collapse the moment a national broadcast starts. We ingest every channel to eighteen nodes rather than one. If a node degrades under load, your session is handed to a healthy one mid-stream, so you see a half-second buffer rather than a frozen frame.
The delivery protocol that chops a stream into small chunks fetched over ordinary web requests.
HTTP Live Streaming breaks a channel into short segments and serves them over standard HTTPS. Because it looks like ordinary web traffic, it passes through firewalls and consumer routers without special configuration, and it allows a player to switch quality mid-stream if your connection changes. It is specified in RFC 8216.
A hardware identifier unique to a network device.
Purpose-built IPTV receivers are provisioned against their MAC address rather than a username, which is why setup involves emailing us the string printed on the base of the box. It also means the box keeps working if you move house; the account follows the hardware rather than the address.
The speed that actually reaches your device, as opposed to the number on your bill.
Your plan speed is what arrives at the modem. Throughput is what arrives at the streaming stick behind the television two rooms away, and the gap between the two is where nearly all streaming problems live. We have seen gigabit fibre plans deliver 12 Mbps to a device in a basement corner. Always measure on the device itself, in the room where it lives, at the time of day you watch.
One simultaneous stream. It is not a device limit.
A connection is the number of screens that can be playing at the same moment. It has nothing to do with how many devices you install on. A single-connection plan can live on the living room TV, a bedroom TV, two phones and a laptop all at once; only one can be playing at a time. This is the single most misunderstood part of buying an IPTV subscription, and getting it wrong costs money in one direction or causes arguments in the other.
Paying only the difference for the days remaining when you add a connection mid-plan.
If you move from two connections to three halfway through a twelve-month plan, you pay the price difference for the remaining days rather than starting a new term. The change takes effect within minutes and does not require reinstalling anything or changing your credentials; the same login simply permits more simultaneous streams.
The wholesale unit resellers buy. One credit creates or renews one month of one connection.
A customer buying a six-month, two-connection plan consumes twelve credits. Credits do not expire, so a reseller can buy at the best rate they can afford and draw them down over time rather than committing to a monthly quota.