IPTV vs streaming services: the comparison nobody made when you cut the cord
Cancelling cable was supposed to be the end of it. Six years later the average cord-cutting household pays for a live TV bundle, a sports package and three on-demand apps, and the combined bill has quietly passed what cable cost. This page compares the two models honestly, including the four situations where streaming is the better answer.
Last reviewed 2 September 20268 min read
Quick answer
Is IPTV cheaper than streaming services?
Usually, once you compare like with like. Replicating what internet television delivers — live channels, live sport and an on-demand library — currently takes a live TV streaming bundle at $77–$83 a month, a league sports package at $15–$30, and two or three on-demand apps at $35–$50: roughly $130 to $172 a month. A DrexTV annual plan is $116.00, an effective $9.67 a month. If you only want one on-demand catalogue and watch no live television, a single streaming app is cheaper and simpler.
- $130–$172
- Monthly cost of a full streaming stack
- $9.67
- DrexTV effective monthly
- 0
- Original productions we make
- 1
- Guides, logins and bills
Live bundle + sport + three apps
On the 12 months plan
This is streaming's advantage, not ours
Instead of four or five
The arithmetic
What a full streaming stack actually costs in 2026
Not the headline price of one app — the total for a household that wants live channels, live sport and a decent on-demand catalogue.
| Subscription | Monthly cost | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| A large general on-demand service, ad-free | $18 – $25 | Originals and a rotating licensed catalogue |
| A second on-demand service, ad-free | $12 – $18 | A different rotating catalogue; overlap is minimal |
| A third on-demand service | $8 – $16 | Usually bought for one show, then kept |
| A live TV streaming bundle | $77 – $83 | 80–100 live channels and your local affiliates |
| A league-specific sports package | $15 – $30 | Out-of-market games for one sport, blackouts still apply |
Added up, that is $130 to $172 a month, or roughly $1,560 to $2,064 a year. It is also five separate bills, five interfaces, five search boxes and no single programme guide. The comparable DrexTV figure is $116.00 a year.
We are quoting bands rather than exact figures deliberately, because these services reprice several times a year and a precise number that is six months stale is worse than an honest range. Check your own bank statement rather than trusting our table or anyone else's — the exercise takes two minutes and the total is usually higher than people expect, because the subscriptions were added one at a time.
Head to head
Feature by feature, including where we lose
A comparison table that only favoured one side would tell you nothing. Three rows below go the other way, and one of them is decisive for some households.
| DrexTV | Streaming stack | Better | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live linear channels | 24,000+ across 100+ countries | None on on-demand apps; 80–100 on a live TV bundle | IPTV |
| On-demand library | 140,000++ titles, aggregated | Deep but siloed — each app holds its own catalogue | Roughly equal |
| Original productions | None — we produce nothing | The entire reason these services exist | Streaming |
| Live sport | Every major league, no separate tier, pay-per-view included | Fragmented across services and league packages | IPTV |
| Catalogue stability | Aggregated, so a title leaving one source is often still available | Titles rotate out monthly as licences expire | IPTV |
| Interface and discovery | One guide, one search, one login | Polished individually; incoherent collectively | IPTV |
| 4K and HDR | Included on every plan | Usually restricted to the most expensive tier | IPTV |
| Advertising | None inserted by us; whatever the source channel carries | Cheaper tiers are ad-supported by design | Roughly equal |
| Offline downloads | Not supported | Supported on most on-demand apps | Streaming |
| Setup and hardware | About 5 minutes, devices you own | Minutes, devices you own | Roughly equal |
| Monthly cost for the full picture | $9.67 on the annual plan | $130 – $172 for the stack above | IPTV |
Analysis
Why unbundling ended up costing more than the bundle
This was not inevitable, and understanding the mechanism makes the next few years easier to predict.
The bundle was subsidising the parts you did not watch
A cable package was economically strange: you paid for 200 channels and watched twelve. The unwatched channels were not waste from the operator's point of view — carriage fees were negotiated in aggregate, and the bundle spread the cost of expensive content across subscribers who never touched it. Sports channels in particular were funded by households that did not watch sport.
Unbundling removed that cross-subsidy. When you buy only what you want, you pay the unsubsidised price for it, and for sport that price is high. This is why a single league's out-of-market package can cost $30 a month on its own: there is no longer anyone else helping to pay for it.
Every seller now prices its slice independently
In the bundle era one operator negotiated with many content owners and sold one price to you. Today each studio runs its own platform, each league sells direct, and each one prices to maximise its own revenue. Nobody is optimising your total bill, because nobody can see it. The predictable result is that the sum of the parts exceeds the old whole — and it will keep rising, because each seller's incentive is to raise its own price slightly and absorb the churn.
Exclusivity fragments the catalogue as well as the price
The second effect is discovery. A title is on one platform this year and another next, because most catalogue is licensed rather than owned. Households now routinely search three apps to find a film, or search a fourth to find out which of the three has it. The interfaces are individually excellent and collectively incoherent, and no amount of UI polish fixes a problem caused by rights allocation.
Where internet television sits in that structure
Aggregation after the fact. Internet television takes the linear channels — the ones carrying the sport, the news, the general entertainment — and puts them behind one guide with one search and one login. It does not solve the originals problem, because originals are exclusive by design. What it does solve is the live-television problem, which is where the fragmentation is worst and the money is largest.
Which is why the honest recommendation for most households is not “cancel everything”. It is: keep the one on-demand service whose originals you actually watch, drop the live bundle and the sports packages, and put internet television in their place. That combination is typically $9.67 plus one app rather than $130 to $172, and you lose almost nothing you were using.
Where streaming wins
Four situations where you should not switch
If any of these describes your household, subscription streaming is the better product and we would rather say so than take a subscription you will cancel in a fortnight.
You only watch originals
If your viewing is three prestige dramas a year and nothing else, a single on-demand subscription is cheaper, simpler and better. We produce no original content and never will — that is not a gap we are trying to close, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
You need offline downloads
On-demand apps let you download to a device for a flight or a commute. IPTV is a live delivery model and does not, which is a genuine limitation rather than a configuration problem. If you watch mostly on a train with no signal, this is decisive.
You watch almost no live television
The case for internet television is built on live channels, sport and a programme guide. If none of those matter to you, most of what you would be paying for goes unused, and a single on-demand app serves you better.
Your internet connection is unreliable
On-demand playback buffers far ahead and tolerates a poor line. Live streaming cannot, because it is happening now. On a connection that drops several times an evening, on-demand apps will feel noticeably more forgiving.
The same reasoning applied to cable rather than streaming — including the cases where cable still wins — is in IPTV vs cable.
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Questions and answers