I came here to read through the responses and was surprised to see that the answers given were not all that great.

Feeds come from many different places. Often people use services like psvue or other online sources (for example nhl.com streams all their games live) and then use ffmpeg to restream.

In some cases, people even set up cable boxes at their house with capture cards if there is no online stream and trade feeds. I know a guy who used to run cp24 in HD for one of the popular providers and they would provide him with free access to their service.

I've done some streaming on a smaller scale for special events, and chose to use wirecast for professional feeds with the ability to substitute in my own commercials etc.

My home connection though is 1.25gbps upload and download... So I have the ability to work with it quite a bit... Although some devices that use copper are limited to about 940mbps.

For anyone that wants to start their own iptv service, to be competitive with the other big iptv providers out there you really need to set aside a couple thousand dollars a month and purchase stations in bulk then resell.

Its the only way nowadays.

There are many different way to do it but the most common is people use providers that do not encrypt their channels well and they use a custom box to decode and “restream” it to a server and from there, the end user. Decoding it with a custom box is what allows them to do multiple at once rather than just the one. Hope this helps give you a bit of an understanding and point you in the right direction.

If you find sourcing for the streams themselves, IPTV resellers/providers will use software on their servers to add-remove/manage/control/etc customers.

One software being https://xtream-codes.com/

If you don't like direct links, and I typically tell people to just Google vs direct clicking (or whatever your search pref. DuckDuck, StartPage, Bing, blah blah) then just search: "xtream codes"

I don’t know how the main IPTV providers here work, but this is what I do with family and friends:

The main telecom provider in Spain doesn’t encrypt their IPTV channels at all, they only block the multicast IPs of the channels that you haven’t paid for. This happens in a lot of countries.

I have set-up a TVHeadend server and added the channel list to it. It just re-streams the channels to the users.

HD channels take around 10 Mbps, so if you have their top-tier fiber optic it will be 600 Mbps upload = around 60 simultaneous users at the same time (a little less, because there will be some overhead).

I see a lot of ps4 restreams I know this by the commercial breaks

Yes I've seen PSVue, DirecTV and Bell sources from Canada. I always thought they ran the feed through a HDMI splitter that strips the HDCP so you can feed and stream it....

I'm just a lay person when it comes to all this but I've been watching channels before and had the video stop and you could see the person was running it on Android with the sling app (or whatever app for live channels). He had some kind of automation going on too where it seemed to know the channel or app crashed so it would try to reopen the app and load the channel.

So my thinking is he's running a VM for each channel and then probably using OBS or something to stream it.