IPTV in France

Start on the living-room TV

This page is the France entry point. The long read is the IPTV in France 2026 guide. If the playlist already plays and you only need to pick the living-room app, start with the IBO vs Duplex vs HOT comparison for Orange, Free, and SFR TVs. Use this hub to pick the app on the main TV, check what your home line actually changes, and find the EPG matching notes without opening every article first.

Most French living rooms need one player the whole house can use. That is still IBO Player. French providers already mention it in setup notes. It keeps accented titles readable in the channel list and the guide. It also covers the devices that show up in the same apartment: Android TV or a Fire Stick on the main set, a Samsung or LG in the bedroom, and a phone in the kitchen.

Duplex TV is the better living-room pick when the TV is an older Samsung or LG, or when someone in the house lives in the programme guide. The France guide calls this Duplex Player. On this site the player page is Duplex TV. Same app. Use it if you want reminders for the 20h on TF1, a tighter favourite-only guide, or a box that struggles with heavier players.

HOT Player stays Android-first. It is fine on a Fire Stick or a phone when the playlist has a real French VOD library and you want posters instead of a long channel list. It is a weak only-app if the lounge TV is a Samsung or LG. Install IBO Player there, then add HOT Player only if you already know you want that home screen.

What Free, Orange, and SFR change at home

Fibre from Orange, Free, SFR, and Bouygues is why HD IPTV is ordinary in French cities. The player does not fix a congested cable riser or a blocked port. Ethernet to the box still beats arguing about buffer sizes.

Orange fibre. Leave the buffer where the player put it. Channel changes should feel instant. If login fails on a line that otherwise works, the France guide covers CGNAT and the HTTP URL on port 80 or 443. The first fix in the house is usually DNS. Orange's resolver is slow on some CDN hostnames. Set Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or Google 8.8.8.8 in the Livebox, then retry. Orange ADSL or VDSL is a different story. 1080p is fine. 4K is not a promise.

Free. The Freebox can multicast French DTT. Your IPTV player is still unicast. Those are not the same path. Port 8080 is the one Free likes to break. Ask the provider for 80 or 443 before you reinstall the app. Free also ships IPv6 by default. Older player builds mishandle AAAA records and fail to resolve the stream host. Update IBO Player or Duplex TV first. The 4G or 5G Freebox is a holiday-flat line. Do not use it as the main TV connection.

SFR. SFR fibre behaves like Orange fibre for this purpose. Numericable cable does not. In a busy Paris or Lyon building the evening load shows up on beIN SPORTS 1 around 21:00. Wire the box. Raise the buffer. Wi-Fi on a shared 5 GHz network in the same flat makes that worse. SFR 4G Box is the same class of last-resort line as Free's mobile box.

Bouygues fibre follows the Orange fibre advice. Bouygues DSL is Orange copper under another logo, so treat it like Orange DSL. The France guide has the longer ISP notes if you need them.

Prove the playlist, then fix the guide

Do not start with a 10,000-row Europe bundle. Pin TF1, France 2, M6, and beIN SPORTS 1. If those four play, the subscription is usable. Canal+, DAZN, RMC Sport, and the regional rows can wait. The France guide is the place for that channel map, including the Canal+ authentication cases that IBO Player cannot invent.

French public XMLTV IDs already live in that guide. Common tokens are tf1.fr and france-2.fr. This hub will not repeat the table. If France 2 shows last night's film after a "successful" refresh, the file loaded and the row is bound to the wrong id. That is a matching problem.

The XMLTV ID hub walks through how IBO Player, MAT Player, and Duplex TV attach an id to a row. The public stacks there are SRF, ERT, VRT, and SVT. The bind is the same work on TF1 or France 2. Search the XML for the id, not the pretty name. Auto-match still grabs "France 2 HD" and leaves the row you watch empty. If the whole grid is blank, you do not have an ID problem yet. Fix the URL and the refresh first.

Set the player to UTF-8 before you decide French titles are broken. Boxes on Journal de 20 heures are encoding, not a bad playlist.