IPTV vs cable in 2027: what $69 a year actually replaces

August 12, 2026 · 7 min read · Updated August 31, 2026

Cable advertises a headline rate and bills you something else. Here is the arithmetic with every fee included, and the honest limits of what IPTV replaces.

The number on a cable advert is almost never the number on the bill. That gap is the entire reason cord-cutting keeps growing, and it is worth working through carefully rather than accepting either side's marketing.

What an American TV bill actually contains

Take a mid-tier cable package advertised at $80 a month. By the time it arrives, it typically carries a set-top box rental, a broadcast TV fee, and a regional sports surcharge. None of those are optional and none appear in the advertised rate.

Line item	Typical monthly	In the advertised price?
Base package	$80	Yes
Set-top box rental	$8–15	No
Broadcast TV fee	$12–25	No
Regional sports fee	$10–15	No
Second-year rate increase	$15–30	No

A package sold at $80 lands somewhere between $110 and $135 by month three, and higher again once the promotional period lapses. Over twelve months that is roughly $1,300 to $1,600.

What the streaming bundles cost instead

The licensed live-TV streaming bundles are cheaper than cable but not cheap. The two largest sit in the high eighties to high nineties per month, which is $1,000 or more a year, and the sports-first alternative is comparable. The budget option is genuinely cheaper at around $46, but it drops enough channels that most households treat it as a partial solution rather than a replacement.

Crucially, none of them solve the blackout problem. Paying $90 a month does not guarantee your local baseball team, because that restriction is written into the league's rights deal rather than the streamer's package.

Where an IPTV subscription sits

Our annual plan is $69, which works out at $5.75 a month. See the full breakdown on the pricing page. Against a $1,300 cable year that is a saving of roughly $1,230, and against a $1,050 streaming-bundle year it is about $980.

What IPTV does not replace

Being straight about the limits is more useful than another savings table.

There is no contract to fall back on. If a stream goes down mid-game, you have support and a refund window, not a service-level agreement.
Local affiliate feeds are less reliable than on cable, because they are the most geographically restricted content in American television.
DVR works differently. Catch-up covers the last few days rather than an unlimited cloud recorder.
It depends entirely on your internet. A household on 15 Mbps with three simultaneous streams will have a worse time than the same household on cable.

The honest summary

If your priority is the lowest possible cost for the widest possible channel list, the arithmetic is not close. If your priority is contractual certainty and guaranteed local affiliates, cable still wins and costs twenty times more for that certainty.

Most people land somewhere in between, which is why we run a 24-hour free trial rather than asking you to take the comparison on trust. Test it on a weeknight evening, on the device you actually watch, during something live.