On a professional wholesale level they use satellite, cable, FTA, any source they can get. Decent equipment is expensive, terabytes of bandwidth at a multiple countries Hosting datacentres are expensive too, billing platform, support, hiding from police, being scared the Bank or PayPal will block you anytime, Hoster blocking your servers etc etc. all cost money.

What sources are used and what hardware is involved pretty much depends on the provider and what's available to them.

Sometimes they're pulling an official stream from the channel's own distribution platform. Sometimes they're getting a feed from another IPTV provider. Sometimes they're using digital TV tuners on a PC to capture OTA/cable/satellite feeds and pass along the full feed. A few have modified or commercial studio grade tuners that do that standalone. HDMI capture from standard tuners is also common. Once I even saw what was clearly someone just capturing their own PC screen while playing a web based stream of an event.

In the end it really doesn't matter that much from a technical standpoint what the actual source was as long as it's sufficiently reliable and high quality to be able to feed your encoding and distribution components with what they need.

IPTV streamers are like Drug Cartels , they are so big and so $$$$$ , IPTV market worth $80bn and IPTV Market Size Worth $117.07 Billion By 2025

Most of the IPTV services you know are just resellers , and some are Re-streamers but the real guys are those who get the main source and start to distribute it to resellers and other re-streamers ..

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-- And no the big guys does not capture there own pc streaming .

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To have an idea about the equipment's :

https://www.hddbunker.com/image/P0Tr

https://www.hddbunker.com/image/PnWs

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Seriously what is with all the fucktards coming here lately and asking these types of questions?

Sorry FBI/MPAA/CRTC/other organizations, you aren't going to get any real information here.