iptv: Propose: Allow adding geo-blocked broadcasts to the playlist

Why not targeting LyngSat and the satellites ? Channels (apart from international ones) are not streamed in every single available satellite.

The targeted area is where the channel is coming from and/or where it needs to be streamed. Simple.

A simple search for the channel name on the internet, and looking at the legal info in their website (or a WHOIS) permits you to get the actual country the channel is being streamed on.

I think these are two issues. Using WhoIs / legal data to find where a channel is based if there are no alternative sources is fine, but if there are better sources, such as the website itself, we should rely on that.

As for LyngSat - again, I think we should be careful to differentiate between markets accessible vs markets served/targeted. For example, an Italian channel is accessible throughout europe and north africa via satellite, but the channel is mainly targeting Italians in italy through its distribution and advertising. The only country listed under tvg-country in this scenario should be Italy.

I guess my point is, things are complicated and we shouldn’t simply rely on one source but rather a variety of sources and the community’s best judgement.

Thank you all for participating in the discussion. Let me summarize:

We allow geo-blocked broadcasts to be added to the playlist as long as they are labeled accordingly:

#EXTINF:-1 tvg-country="CH",RSI La 1 [Geo-blocked]

The presence of this label means that the broadcast is accessible only in the country specified in the attribute tvg-country and should be tested only from it or via VPN. The label in this case is taken from Wikipedia, but if necessary we can easily change it in the future.

As for the other topics raised here, I suggest creating separate issues for each so that their discussion is not lost among the rest of the comments.

And again, thank you all for your help!

This is a good idea, but IMO the geogated streams should be in separate playlist files (eg. one playlist for “Australia” and a separate one for “Australia - Geogated”).

@freearhey @Daniel15 That is an interesting approach, imagine if we took all the country codes we have now and added a duplicate set but with a -g to them. So if I had a USA geo-gated channel, I would list it as tvg-country="US-G" (or we could use R for restricted) and there would be a separate playlist created for the geo-gated channels. We could also restrict channels with -G countries from appearing in language (and category) specific playlists. If we do this, we might be able to get away with not having to notate that a stream is geo restricted in the name.

Also, I have heard a lot of ways to describe these channels geo-gated, geo-blocked, geo-locked, region restricted, etc. Is one term better than another?

I got a few geo-locked US channels. so I’m all for this so long as you add that it’s geolocked to the channel title.

Wouldn’t this raise some voices about “why this channel doesn’t work from where I watch it” ? Sounds good on the paper, but this will maybe come with some slight misunderstandings.

Maybe precising in the channel name that the channel is geo-blocked ?