Every IPTV Term, Explained in Plain English

By Xerquvatv Team · Published 19 September 2026 · Updated 24 September 2026

IPTV comes with its own thicket of jargon, and most of it is simpler than it sounds once someone explains it plainly. Here are the terms you will run into when buying and setting up a subscription in Australia, grouped so you can find what you need, each in a sentence or two of plain English rather than tech-speak.

The basics

IPTV — Internet Protocol Television. Live channels and on-demand content delivered over your internet connection instead of a dish or a cable. Kayo and Binge are IPTV; so is a full channel subscription.

Stream — a single channel or title arriving as a continuous flow of data. When people say a stream “dropped”, they mean that flow was interrupted.

Server / host — the machine your player connects to for the channels. The “server address” or “host” is one of the three login details you enter.

Line — everyday shorthand for a single subscription or account. “A two-screen line” means an account that plays two streams at once.

Logins and playlists

Xtream Codes — the most common login method, made up of three values: a server address, a username and a password. Enter them once and the app builds the channel list and guide itself. Prefer this wherever a player offers it.

M3U — a plain playlist file that pairs channel names with stream addresses. An alternative to the Xtream login, used mainly by VLC, Kodi and Smart IPTV.

Playlist — the list of channels an M3U link contains. Loading a playlist and logging in with Xtream achieve the same end by different routes.

get.php / xmltv.php — the tail ends of the M3U and guide URLs respectively. You rarely type them by hand, but they help you recognise which link is which.

The guide and the extras

EPG — Electronic Programme Guide, the grid showing what is on now and next. A good EPG is the main reason people move to TiViMate.

VOD — Video On Demand, the library of films and series you can start any time, separate from the live channels.

Catch-up — the ability to rewind a live channel and watch a programme that has already aired, usually for the past few days.

Multi-view — showing more than one channel on screen at once, a paid TiViMate feature that comes into its own on a busy Saturday of sport.

Picture quality

SD, HD, FHD, 4K — rising levels of detail. Standard, High Definition, Full HD (1080p) and 4K (also called Ultra HD or UHD), the last being four times the pixels of Full HD.

Bitrate — how much data a stream uses per second. It matters as much as resolution: a high-bitrate HD feed can look better than a heavily squeezed 4K one.

HEVC / H.265 — the compression standard that makes 4K practical over a normal connection. Most modern devices decode it in hardware; very old ones do not.

Buffering — the pause and spinning wheel when the stream cannot keep up. Usually a sign of a stretched connection or an overloaded server.

Devices and apps

Firestick — Amazon’s Fire TV Stick, the most popular IPTV device in Australia because it is cheap and allows sideloading.

Sideloading — installing an app that is not in the device’s official store, needed on a Firestick to get the better players on.

APK — an Android app installer file, the thing you download when sideloading.

Downloader — the small app used to fetch APKs onto a Firestick. The orange one from AFTVnews is the one to use.

TiViMate, IPTV Smarters Pro, Smart IPTV — the three players most people use. Smarters runs everywhere and is free; TiViMate is Android-only with the best guide; Smart IPTV runs on Samsung and LG by MAC upload.

MAG / Formuler — dedicated IPTV boxes built for this and nothing else, prized for steady playback on a main television.

Boxes and portals

Portal — the address a MAG box connects to, tied to that box, rather than an ordinary app login.

MAC address — a unique identifier printed on a box or shown in an app. MAG portals and Smart IPTV both register your account against it. On a MAG it starts 00:1A:79.

The business side

Reseller — someone who buys credits at wholesale and sells subscriptions under their own name, using a provider’s servers.

Credit — the unit resellers spend; one credit typically activates one month on one screen.

Connection terms

NBN — Australia’s National Broadband Network, the fixed connection most homes use. An NBN 50 plan is comfortable for IPTV.

Ethernet — a wired network connection. Plugging a box in by cable rather than wi-fi is the single best fix for buffering.

Throttling — a telco deliberately slowing certain traffic at busy times. Rare, but the main legitimate reason someone might use a VPN.

VPN — a service that routes your traffic through another server. Useful only if your connection is being shaped; not part of a normal IPTV setup.

That covers the vocabulary you are likely to meet. None of it is as technical as it first looks, and you can set up a subscription knowing only a handful of these terms. If a word turns up that is not here, ask us on WhatsApp and we will explain it — and the setup hub walks through the practical side for your exact device.

Related articles