Anyone recommend an IPTV provider that’s not going to go out of business within a couple of months? I’ve used about four in the last two years and can’t seem to find a new one that will reply to my questions. Please tell me someone has a one they use reliably! 
What’s an IPTV provider?
I didn’t know either Jane - looked it up on Google - it stands for Internet Protocol Television. Lots of fascinating stuff about it on line in both French and English.
The business model seems flawed to the extent that these companies attempt to thrive on exploiting grey (or not so grey) areas of the law with regard to intellectual property rights of the rights holders. As the trend is to give more power to rights holders to control their distribution channels, rather than open up access in an uncontrolled fashion, it seems to me that they’re on a bit of a sticky wicket. If access were completely open, there wouldn’t be any demand for IPTV, and in the opposite, attempting to evade rights protections put in place by broadcasters is just asking for trouble.
On the other hand as the world becomes more “global” the artificial boundaries set up by the media companies to exploit and maximise their revenue streams seems more and more archaic.
There is no technical bar to streaming UK content into France (or pretty much anywhere else) - I’ll bet you could even arrange English ads for French services to go along with it - it’s not done because the market is too small and the licencing too tied to old notions of geographic boundaries.
But you are right - the broadcasters are not currently terribly keen and periodically shut down individual services VPN/proxy end points so, inevitably, if you want to continue service you have to move suppliers, or find some way of rolling your own VPN which can fly under the radar.
The irony is that even the newer entrants to the market, such as Netflix, have adopted a geo-localised model, which is why national catalogues of available content differ (irrespective of any language specific considerations). The very model they were attempting to disrupt meets the limits of having to cosy up to the local mass suppliers of content and their traditional licensing models. How long that kind of arrangement can possibly survive, I don’t know, as people on the whole still want to be able to choose from as broad a catalogue as possible.