Is IPTV Legal in the UK?

The relevant legislation is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, supplemented by the Digital Economy Act 2017. Distributing copyrighted broadcast content without a licence is a criminal offence, and the 2017 Act raised the maximum sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years.

UK enforcement has consistently targeted the supply side rather than viewers. The Premier League, FACT and Trading Standards have brought prosecutions against people selling pre-loaded devices and reselling subscriptions, and courts have used the Fraud Act 2006 as well as copyright law to do it. Sellers have received custodial sentences.

For viewers, the legal position is less severe but not nothing. Accessing an unauthorised stream is a civil copyright infringement in the UK rather than a criminal one for personal use, and there is no meaningful history of individual UK viewers being prosecuted. Internet providers do, however, block known infringing services under court order, and the Premier League obtains fresh blocking orders every season.

We provide access to streams and we require every customer to ensure they hold the necessary rights to view the content they access in their jurisdiction. That obligation is set out in our terms and conditions and is yours, not ours, to satisfy.

We operate a DMCA notice-and-takedown process and remove reported content. If you are a rights holder, our DMCA page explains how to submit a notice and what we do with it.

We are not going to tell you that a twenty-thousand-channel service at £5 a month is a fully licensed broadcaster, because you would be right not to believe it. What we will do is be straightforward about what we are, so you can make an informed decision rather than a misinformed one.

VPNs are entirely legal in the UK and are ordinary privacy tools used by millions of people for banking, remote work and public Wi-Fi. Using one does not change the copyright position of anything you watch — it is a privacy measure, not a legal one, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.