“IPTV is cheaper than cable” is true and almost useless, because how much cheaper depends entirely on who is asking. A single viewer who watches the news and a couple of dramas saves very little. A household following two football leagues and buying fight nights saves an amount that sounds made up.
So instead of one average, here are four households. Find the one closest to yours.
On the numbers: only our own figures are exact — they are the published prices. Everything else varies by country, promotional period and how hard you negotiate, so those are ranges rather than invented precision. Substitute your own bills; the shape of the answer rarely moves.
For reference throughout: one stream costs $35 for three months, $49 for six, or $69 for twelve. Two simultaneous streams are $115 a year, three are $162.
The Single Viewer Who Mostly Watches Drama
This is the household with the least to gain, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
If your television consists of two streaming apps and the occasional live channel, you are probably paying somewhere in the region of $25–$35 a month, and a fair amount of what you watch is original production that only exists on the platform making it. A catalogue of live channels does not replace that; it sits beside it.
Realistic verdict: a modest saving, and the honest reason to switch is breadth rather than money. If your current bill is small and you are happy with it, there is no compelling arithmetic here.
The Sports Household
This is where the numbers stop being marginal.
Following football properly now means a base package, a sports tier, and usually a second platform holding the other half of the fixtures — before any continental competition. Add combat sports and the pay-per-view line alone can exceed everything else combined; a handful of cards a year gets there quickly.
Households in this position routinely find their genuine annual total, once box rental and the quietly-renewing add-on are counted, running well into four figures. Against $69 for a single stream or $115 for two, the comparison is not close — the annual term frequently costs less than one month of what it replaces.
Realistic verdict: the largest saving of any group, by a wide margin, and the group most likely to need two connections rather than one.
The Family Where Everyone Wants Something Different
Here the deciding factor is not price at all — it is simultaneous streams, and getting it wrong is the most common expensive mistake.
Traditional packages solve this with additional boxes at a monthly rental each. The equivalent here is a connection tier, and the pricing is deliberately not linear: three streams cost $162 a year rather than three separate $69 subscriptions.
The trap is buying one connection to test the water and then discovering on the first busy evening that one screen is not enough. Upgrading mid-term costs more than sizing it correctly at the start.
Realistic verdict: a substantial saving, but count your simultaneous screens honestly before you buy, not after.
The Household Watching From Another Country
For this group the question is not price but availability. Home channels from abroad are frequently either unavailable, restricted, or sold as an expensive international package covering a fraction of what you want.
What changes is access rather than cost — though the cost usually improves too, since international packages are priced for a captive audience.
Realistic verdict: the saving is real but secondary. The reason people in this group switch is that the alternative does not exist at any price.
Why the Gap Is That Wide
Something considerably cheaper should make anybody suspicious, so it is worth knowing where the difference comes from.
Conventional providers carry costs unrelated to delivering video to you: physical infrastructure, installation crews, hardware, retail presence, and rights negotiated market by market. Streaming platforms carry a different burden — original production, which is enormously expensive and funded by every subscriber whether they watch any of it or not.
The rest is fragmentation, which is not an accident but the business model. Every competition that moves to its own platform creates another subscription, and the total is designed to be uncomfortable to add up.
When Switching Is the Wrong Call
Three situations where the saving is not worth it, and it is better to say so:
- Your internet is unreliable. Your connection becomes the single point of failure — satellite does not care that somebody upstairs started a large download. Fix the line first or do not switch.
- You mainly watch platform originals. Those exist only where they are made. Live channels are not a substitute for them.
- You want zero setup. A 26,000-entry list is genuinely unwieldy for the first week, and becomes pleasant only after ten minutes spent building a favourites list. That is ten minutes nobody warns you about.
If the first one is your concern, the buffering guide covers how to tell whether your line is up to it before committing.
Testing the Sums Without Cancelling Anything
Work out your own annual figure with a bank statement open rather than from memory — the gap between what people estimate and what they actually pay is routinely a factor of two. Then run a free trial alongside what you already have, for a few days, without cancelling anything.
Watch which one you actually reach for. That settles the only question that matters — whether the replacement covers what you personally watch — and it costs nothing to find out.
