By now we are all more or less clear that Kodi is much more than just a video and music player. It is a multimedia center with which you can play video games, listen to the radio, configure add-ons to watch streaming content, and even play IPTV lists to watch TV over the Internet.
However, to be able to watch IPTV on Kodi, it is necessary to install an IPTV client -or what is the same, a small program or internal complement- that allows you to manage this type of connection in the player. Let’s see how to do it step by step. It is very simple!
Is it legal to use IPTV lists on Kodi?
Before starting, if it is the first time that you are going to watch television through IPTV, it is important to make it clear that this is a completely legal technology (be careful, we are talking about the technology, not the content). That is to say, basically, IPTVs are nothing more than television broadcasts that are carried out over the Internet from an IP address that serves the streaming content.
Many television networks broadcast over the Internet in the same way that they broadcast over a digital terrestrial or analog signal. However, not all these Internet broadcasts are legal and piracy is also present in these types of systems. As a general rule, if an IPTV is too good to be true, the best you can do is reject this type of service and always opt for official sources.
Otherwise, you face powerful sanctions for buying pirated IPTV in most countries. Sometimes cheap is expensive (or very expensive), pun intended.
How to watch IPTV on Kodi step by step
That said, to watch streaming television from Kodi the first thing you have to do, of course, is to have an IPTV list or file that you can play. They are usually files in M3U format. For this example, you can download an IPTV list from the GitHub repository of IPTV-ORG, an international project that collects all the public IPTV broadcast openly over the Internet.
Once you have the IPTV file at hand, open Kodi (if you don’t have it installed yet you can download it from its website ) and follow these steps:
- From the side options menu go to “ Add-ons ” and click on “ Download ”.
- Click on ” PVR Clients ” and select the add-on called ” PVR IPTV Simple Client “.
- On the next screen, click on ” Install “.
- Next, you will see a message requesting the installation of a couple of additional plugins necessary to be able to run the IPTV client correctly. Click ” OK ” to continue.
And ready! If everything goes well, you will see a message at the top of Kodi indicating that “PVR IPTV Simple Client” has been installed correctly.
Opening the M3U File
Now you only need to open the M3U file that contains the IPTV channels you want to play.
- From the Kodi side menu go to ” Add-ons -> My add-ons “.
- Click on ” PVR Clients “.
- Select ” PVR IPTV Simple Client ” and click on the ” Configure ” button.
- In the ” General ” tab select ” Location -> Local path ” to choose the M3U file you want to play. Note: You can also choose “Remote path” if instead of a file you have a URL where said M3U list is located.
- Click on ” Path to M3U list ” and tell Kodi where the file is located.
- Click ” OK “.
- Go back to the main Kodi menu and go to ” TV -> Channels ” where you will see a list with all the TV channels that contain the IPTV list you have just configured.
Goal achieved! As you can see, it is a process that has its crumb, but in a couple of minutes, you can have everything configured and enjoy streaming television from Kodi without too many complications.
