Is IPTV legal in the Netherlands?

The technology is not the problem

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television: television delivered over an internet connection instead of over a coaxial cable, a satellite dish or an aerial.

That is a delivery method, and delivery methods are not illegal. NLZIET does it. Netflix does it. The Ziggo and KPN television apps do it. Nobody argues those are unlawful, because the argument was never about the pipe.

So when someone asks “is IPTV legal”, the honest first answer is: you are asking about the wrong thing.

Where the actual question sits

The question is copyright, and specifically: is the party passing this channel on entitled to pass it on?

Broadcasting rights are sold in slices. Per country. Per platform — cable, satellite, streaming can each be sold separately. Sometimes per competition, and occasionally per individual match. On top of that, there are frequently several intermediaries between the rights holder and the service you are looking at.

The result is that from the outside, as a consumer, you usually cannot establish which link in that chain has covered which right. Not because it is a secret, but because the arrangements are commercial contracts that nobody publishes.

That is what “grey area” actually means here. It is not a euphemism for illegal, and it is not a euphemism for legal either. It is a scale, and different services sit at different points on it.

Why we will not tell you we are fully licensed

Go through this market and you will find “100% legal” written on almost every homepage — including, conspicuously, on the sites where it is least likely to be true.

We do not put that claim on ours, and the reason is not modesty. A claim you cannot verify from the outside is worthless as information. It costs nothing to write and it tells you nothing, so a market where everyone writes it is a market where the phrase has stopped meaning anything.

What we would rather do is describe how we work and let you check that yourself.

What you can actually check

You cannot audit anyone’s rights position from your sofa. You can check behaviour, and behaviour correlates better than badges:

1. Does a real person answer, and how fast? Send a specific question before you buy anything — not “how much is it” but something concrete. Time the reply. Do this with every provider you are considering.
2. Can you start with a single month? A provider selling only year-long packages is asking for trust it has not yet earned. That is true whatever its legal position.
3. Do they admit outages happen? They do happen, to everyone in this market. A provider claiming otherwise is either not being honest or does not yet have enough customers to have noticed.
4. Do they make claims they cannot back up? Certification badges, invented review scores, “thousands of 4K channels”. Each of those is a signal, and not a good one.
5. Do they ask you to disable security settings? Downloading a file from an unknown website and switching off a protection is a bad idea regardless of who is asking.

Where that leaves you

If you want the version with no ambiguity at all, the answer is straightforward: use NLZIET, or the television app from your own internet provider. Those services have their rights arranged and there is nothing to weigh up. For a lot of households that is genuinely the better choice, and we say the same thing on our Dutch pages.

If you want a package that also carries international channels and sport without three separate subscriptions, you are in the part of the market described above, and you should go in knowing that rather than being told it is simple.

That is the whole of our position. How we work is on the English overview, what it costs is on plans and pricing, and the longer Dutch version of this article — with more detail on the Dutch situation specifically — is at is IPTV legaal in Nederland?

This article is general information and not legal advice. For a specific situation, consult a qualified lawyer.