I sat down to compare Canadian IPTV providers and the first thing I learned is that on paper there is nothing to compare. Every one of them says the same words: thousands of channels, 4K, a money-back guarantee.
The differences are all in the places a sales page does not go.
What I eventually sorted them on was four things, and none of them appears in a listing.
Peak-hour capacity. Whether the picture holds at nine on a weeknight, not at two on a Sunday afternoon. This is the biggest difference between services and the one you cannot see until you are paying.
Support at a bad hour. I sent the same question to a few of them on a Sunday evening. One replied in forty minutes, one in three days, and one never did.
The guide. A programme guide that is slow or wrong is one the household stops using, and a service you have stopped using the guide on is half a service.
And how long the operation had existed, which is a thirty-second domain-age check and tells you what you are betting when you prepay a year.
The channel counts, which every one of them led with, turned out to be the least useful number of all — inflated the same ways everywhere and broadly identical once you strip the padding out.
The method, written out so you can run it yourself, is set out here.
A dozen services, one afternoon, and four questions that actually separated them.