About TellyWise

Who writes this

Dan Whitfield — Editor and lead reviewer

Dan has covered UK television and streaming hardware since 2011. He has installed, lived with and taken apart every mainstream British television platform from Sky Q to Freely, and handles the platform reviews, pricing research and the legal explainers.

He writes our service reviews and the IPTV explainers, including the analysis of where UK law draws the line on unlicensed resale.

Priya Raman — Technical writer

Priya writes the setup and troubleshooting material. Every walkthrough on the site is performed on real hardware before publication — she does not describe a menu path from a manufacturer’s support page without going through it herself.

She writes our setup guides, the device comparisons and the player app reviews.

What we test on

Everything is tested in a normal British home on a normal British connection, because that is where these products actually have to work.

The test bench

Line

67 Mbps FTTC, south London — deliberately ordinary

Main television

LG C-series 4K OLED

Secondary

Older 1080p Sony, for legacy testing

Sticks

Fire TV Stick 4K Max, Fire TV Stick HD

Provider hardware

Sky Stream puck, EE TV Box Pro

Free platforms

Humax Freely box, Freeview Play recorder

Measurement

Throughput measured at the device, not the router

We deliberately do not test on a gigabit connection. Most British households are not on one, and a service that only works well above 500 Mbps is not a service that works well.

How the site is organised

Deliberately, and not as a blog. Every page belongs to one of six hubs, and each hub is a single deep guide with a cluster of supporting pages beneath it. Read the hub and you have the whole topic; drill down when you want the specific answer.

The practical benefit for you is that related material is always one link away rather than buried in an archive. Start at what IPTV is, compare the services or fix something, depending on why you came.

The rule we do not bend

This costs us traffic. The transactional searches in this niche are dominated by unlicensed sellers, and sites willing to serve them rank for terms we will never touch. We think that is the right trade.

It is also, in our view, better advice. Unlicensed services fail during live football because of court-ordered blocking, offer no refunds and no support, and put your payment details in a database that enforcement action will eventually seize. Our page on the UK legal position sets out the reasoning in full.

The British television market, and why it needs explaining

Some context for why a site like this exists at all, because the UK situation is genuinely unusual and most international advice does not transfer.

Britain has an exceptionally strong free tier. Between Freely, Freeview Play and free satellite television, a household can watch every public service channel plus a substantial catch-up library for nothing beyond the licence fee. Very few countries offer that, and a great many British households pay for subscriptions that duplicate what they already have.

At the same time the paid market is unusually concentrated and unusually expensive. Premier League rights alone cost well over a billion pounds a season, and that cost flows straight through to the consumer. A fully loaded pay-TV package here approaches £800 a year, which is a lot of money for something most households use casually.

That gap — genuinely excellent free options on one side, genuinely expensive premium sport on the other — is what creates the market for unlicensed resellers. They are not selling convenience; they are selling a way out of a price that many people find unreasonable. Understanding that is important, because it explains why moralising about piracy does not work and why setting out the legal alternatives clearly does.

The other complicating factor is speed of change. Britain moved to internet-delivered television faster than almost anywhere in Europe. Freely launched in 2024. Sky Glass and Sky Stream removed the dish entirely. Freeview recorders are quietly disappearing. Advice written three years ago is frequently wrong now, and a great deal of what ranks in search was written three years ago.

How this is funded

Affiliate commission on some of the licensed services we cover, and display advertising. When you follow a link to a provider and subscribe, we may receive a payment.

Commission does not influence our rankings, and the clearest evidence of that is on our services hub: NOW sits above Sky Stream despite Sky Stream being, on the merits, the better product. Contract-free flexibility matters more to most readers, so that is how we rank them.

The full set of rules we hold ourselves to is in our editorial policy.

What we cover, and what we deliberately do not

The scope is narrower than most sites in this space, and that is a choice rather than a limitation of resources.

In scope

• Licensed UK television services — every platform holding a British broadcast or distribution licence, whether free or paid, IPTV or satellite.
• The hardware they run on — sticks, pucks, boxes and the televisions with platforms built in.
• Player software — the neutral apps that play a playlist you supply, covered as tools rather than as routes to content.
• Setup and troubleshooting — every walkthrough performed on real hardware before publication.
• The law and the licence — where copyright law draws the line, and when a TV Licence is genuinely required.

Out of scope

• Unlicensed IPTV resellers. Not reviewed, not ranked, not named, not linked. This is absolute.
• Playlist sources. We do not link to them, including ones described as free.
• Sideloading walkthroughs. The apps with legitimate uses have their own documentation.
• Workarounds for DRM or regional restrictions.
• Second-hand or "unlocked" hardware listings.
• On-demand-only services. Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video are catalogues rather than television services — they complement everything here rather than competing with it.

We do explain the technology that unlicensed services misuse — M3U playlists and Xtream Codes, streaming protocols, player apps — because these are neutral tools with substantial lawful uses, and refusing to explain them helps nobody. What we do not do is provide routes to unlicensed content.

How a page gets written

Roughly the same sequence every time, and it takes considerably longer than the word count suggests.

The scoring method, the weightings behind it, and the commercial separation rules are all set out in our editorial policy.

Why we take the licensing line we do

It is the most common question we get, usually phrased as some version of "everyone else covers them, why not you?".

The legal answer is straightforward. Reselling access to subscription channels without a licence is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom under section 297A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, carrying up to ten years’ imprisonment. Promoting those services is not a neutral act, and we are not willing to do it for affiliate commission.

But the consumer answer is the one that actually persuades people. Unlicensed services are simply bad products:

• They fail during live football. Rights holders obtain dynamic High Court blocking orders that cut off infringing servers in real time during matches — so the service dies at precisely the moment you wanted it.
• There is no recourse. No refund, no support line, no ombudsman, no realistic chargeback against an anonymous seller.
• Your card details go to a criminal enterprise whose business model already depends on breaking the law.
• Pre-loaded hardware carries unvetted software on a device sitting inside your home network.
• Customer databases get seized. Enforcement action takes subscriber lists, and those have been used to contact end users directly.

That last point is the one people underestimate most. The realistic risk to a buyer is less "you will be prosecuted" and more "your name and payment details sit in a database that will eventually be handed to people who are hostile to you". The full analysis, including which statutes apply to whom, is on our page covering whether IPTV is legal in the UK.

The commercial cost of this position is real. The transactional searches in this niche — the ones with genuine buying intent — belong almost entirely to unlicensed sellers, and sites willing to serve them rank for terms we will never touch. We are content with that trade.

What we would change our minds about

A site that never revises a position is not being careful, it is being stubborn. These are the judgements we hold most loosely, and what would move them.

• Ranking NOW above Sky Stream. This rests on contract-free flexibility being worth more than a better product. If Sky made a rolling monthly Stream option genuinely available rather than intermittent, that ordering would flip.
• Recommending the Fire TV Stick by default. It wins on price and app breadth, not on experience — Amazon’s home screen is increasingly advertising. If Roku or Google closed the app gap, or Amazon pushed the promotion further, we would move.
• Treating cloud Playlist as an acceptable substitute for recording. It is, for most viewing. If rights expiry started removing content more aggressively, it would not be.
• Freely over Freeview Play for aerial households. Freely has the better guide; Freeview Play has more channels and survives outages. As Freely’s line-up grows, that balance shifts.

The one position that will not move is the licensing line. That is not a judgement call subject to new evidence — it is a legal and ethical boundary, and no commercial argument will change it.

Corrections

UK television pricing changes constantly and we will occasionally get something wrong. If you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it and note the change on the page.

Every page carries the date it was last checked. If a price on this site does not match what a provider is currently charging, the provider is right and we are out of date — always confirm on their own site before committing to anything.

You can reach us through our contact page.