IPTV in Sweden: My 3-Year Journey, Setups & What to Avoid

So I’ve been living in Stockholm for about 3 years now (moved here from Gothenburg back in 2022), and honestly, the whole TV situation was driving me CRAZY at first. The regular cable packages are ridiculously expensive and don’t even have half the channels I wanted to watch!

My neighbor Lars (super nice guy, has that classic Dalarna accent) showed me his IPTV setup one night when we were having a few beers. I was like… wait, you get ALL those channels for THAT price?? Mind. Blown.

Anyway, after tons of research and probably too many late nights testing different services (my girlfriend was NOT happy lol), I figured I’d share what I’ve learned about the whole IPTV thing here in Sweden. Trust me, it’s a bit of a mess to figure out at first!

What the heck is IPTV anyway?

OK, so basically IPTV is just TV that comes through your internet instead of those old-school satellite dishes or cable boxes. Remember those ugly satellite dishes everyone had in the 90s? Yeah, none of that nonsense anymore.

I was trying to explain this to my mormor last Christmas in Västerås, and she kept asking if it was “like that YouTube thing” 😂 Close enough, I guess! But it’s more like getting all your regular TV channels through the internet.

The legal stuff (boring but important!)

Alright, I’m not a lawyer or anything, but here’s the deal with IPTV in Sweden right now…

It’s kind of a grey zone, but getting less grey by the day. I read in Aftonbladet that over 700,000 Swedish households are using some kind of illegal IPTV service! That’s crazy when you think about it.

My buddy Erik (who actually IS a lawyer, and reminds us of it constantly when we’re out drinking) told me over surströmming last summer that the government is cracking down hard on this stuff. Apparently they’re even thinking about making it illegal to USE these services, not just to sell them.

I actually chatted with Anders, who runs Nordisk IPTV, at a tech meetup in Södermalm a few months back. Super trevlig guy! He was saying how frustrating it is to run a legit service when so many dodgy ones are undercutting prices. “We pay for all our licenses and do everything by the book,” he told me. “But then people go with the sketchy services that charge half the price and wonder why they get shut down after 3 months.”

Legal vs Sketchy IPTV – Know what you’re getting!

So here’s my totally subjective breakdown after trying way too many services:

The Good Ones:

Netflix, Viaplay, HBO Max – Totally legal but not really IPTV (no live channels)
Nordisk IPTV – Proper licenses, reliable but costs more
Telia Play – Decent but missing international stuff I want

The Sketchy Ones:

Any service advertising “10,000 channels for 99kr” (if it sounds too good to be true…)
Random IPTV apps you find on sketchy forums
That guy selling IPTV subscriptions on Facebook Marketplace (just don’t)

I made the mistake of buying a 6-month subscription from some random site last year… worked great for about 2 weeks, then poof! Gone with my money. Lesson learned the hard way!

What you need to get started

You don’t need much to get going with IPTV, which is pretty sweet:

Decent internet – I’ve got Bahnhof fiber (100/100) and it’s perfect, but my friend in Norrland struggles with his crappy 10Mbps connection
Some kind of device – Smart TV, Android box, Amazon Fire Stick, whatever
A subscription from a provider that won’t disappear overnight with your money

My setup is super simple – just an old Android box I got on Blocket for 300kr connected to my TV. Works like a charm! Though I did have to factory reset it once when it got all laggy (took me forever to figure that out).

My personal IPTV journey (the good, bad & ugly)

So last winter I decided to help my grumpy neighbor, Ingrid (she’s like 70 and always complaining about something) set up IPTV because she was paying Telia like 800kr a month for channels she didn’t even watch.

We went with Nordisk IPTV after I’d tried a couple of others. The setup was actually pretty easy:

Signed up on their website (took like 5 minutes)
Downloaded their app to her Samsung TV
Typed in the login details they emailed
Done!

The funny part was teaching her how to use the remote. She kept pressing random buttons and somehow managed to switch the TV to Chinese language settings 🤦‍♂️ Took us an hour to figure out how to change it back!

But now she’s watching Finnish soap operas all day long and actually brings me kanelbullar as thanks sometimes, so I guess it was worth it!

Different strokes for different folks

My experience is that different IPTV services work better for different people:

For families:
My cousins in Malmö (they have 3 kids under 10) use IPTV mainly for the kids’ channels. They were telling me over Midsommar that the parental controls are super important for them. “Last thing we need is little Elsa accidentally finding some American horror movie,” my aunt said while downing her third snaps.

For sports nuts:
My roommate Björn is OBSESSED with hockey (typical Frölunda fan 🙄). He literally chose our IPTV subscription based solely on which one had the best sports package. He nearly broke our TV when Sweden lost to Finland last year!

For tech-haters:
My dad (who still uses a Nokia from 2010) somehow manages to use IPTV without calling me for help every day, which is honestly a miracle. The interface on Nordisk IPTV is simple enough that even he can figure it out.

Where is this all heading?

From what I can tell, the IPTV situation in Sweden is changing fast. With the government getting more serious about cracking down on illegal services, I think we’ll see more legit options popping up.

I was chatting with some tech people at a meetup in Kista last month (after a few too many öl, admittedly), and the general feeling was that legal IPTV is the future, but the prices need to come down a bit to compete with the illegal stuff.

Some actually helpful resources

If you want to learn more about setting up IPTV properly:

Nordisk IPTV has decent guides on its site
There’s a Swedish YouTuber called TechSnack who has some good tutorials
The Facebook group “IPTV i Sverige” has lots of tips (and drama lol)

Final thoughts

Look, at the end of the day, you get what you pay for with IPTV. I’ve tried the super cheap services and regretted it, and I’ve tried the more expensive legit ones and been much happier.

As my friend Maria said when I was helping her cancel her sketchy IPTV subscription after it went down for the 5th time: “Fan, I should have just listened to you from the beginning!”

Have you tried IPTV yet? Drop a comment below with your experiences – I’m curious if you’ve had better luck than I with some of the services out there!