IPTV for a three-screen household

Dividing €119 by three, and when that division is honest

Each slot costs the same thirty euros to add. A single screen sits at €59; put a second beside it and the year reads €89; the third takes it to €119. The step never changes size. What changes is the share carried by each stream once the total is divided by however many of them there are.

That last column is the argument. A lone screen works out near €4.92 every month, whereas splitting this size three ways lands each stream at roughly €3.31 — under the smallest term, for triple the concurrency. The caveat belongs printed next to the figure rather than beneath it: the division only holds where the third screen is switched on. Buy three for a house that runs two and you have paid €119 for what €89 covered, with no route back before the end date. Arithmetic of this kind pays a busy household and quietly taxes a hopeful one.

The one hour a third slot exists for

Picture the hour between eight and nine in a house of four. Live sport holds the main television downstairs. A bedroom screen has something calm running while the youngest is put down. On a tablet in a third room, a box set is halfway through an episode. Nobody is waiting on anybody, and nobody notices why: three things were wanted, and three slots existed.

That hour is the whole of the case. It is the peak — the one window in an evening when every part of the house wants a screen of its own. A two-slot home reaches that window and somebody gives way. A three-slot home passes through it without registering that it happened. Where bedtimes, shifts and tastes are all different, the third stream is the difference between a term that works most nights and one that works every night.

The opposite case deserves the same space, because printing the inconvenient half is the point of the site. Where your real peak is two, and a third screen would sit dark five nights in seven, the two-screen term is the better commitment and we would rather you took it. Three pays for itself in a house that fills three. In a quieter one it is a year of capacity held back for an evening that never comes, and held-back capacity is not something we will pretend anybody needs. Nor can it be returned in month five — shrinking waits for the next term, which is precisely why this is worth getting right now.

What three streams ask of a broadband line

This is the heaviest demand anything sold here places on a connection, which makes measuring beforehand genuinely worthwhile — an argument about a term can always be had, but no refund has ever repaired a line that will not carry three streams. The rule holds steady: reckon roughly 25 Mbps behind every 4K stream and roughly 15 behind every HD one, added up across the minutes when all three overlap.

Roughly 55 Mbps covers three Ultra HD streams in most houses, a figure fibre and reasonable cable meet without effort. It only applies at the peak, though, and on a typical evening at least one screen has been paused or is sitting in HD, so the genuine draw runs below the table. What fails first is usually not the line at all but the way it is distributed indoors. Three streams lean hardest on the wireless, and a router that barely reaches a back bedroom will falter on the third screen long before the connection itself is exhausted. Running ethernet to the main television and leaving the air to the portable screens does more good than any other single change; the setup guide takes each device in turn. Where the line is fixed wireless or simply old, the true limit is congestion in the evening rather than whatever speed was advertised — so take the reading at eight at night rather than at eleven in the morning, and take it while twelve months is still only a decision.

Three screens, priced market by market

The same size in the money you actually hold, with the per-screen division printed beside it so the arithmetic is visible without converting anything. Everything else stays constant down the column — twelve months, one amount at the start, nothing kept afterwards, and the login coming back in the thread you ordered from. Every row opens its own market page.

Convert the rows into one another and what is left is rounding, which is why nothing is gained by placing an order through a market you do not live in. The Netherlands and the other euro markets run on the base figure, and every market has a page of its own from the country hub.

Picking the size before the year starts

Only one number decides this. It is not the size of the household, and it is not the count of televisions standing about the place. It is the number of screens actually running together on an unremarkable evening. Work that out first and the size follows without argument.

• Two things never run at the same time. A solitary viewer, or a family that sits down to the same programme — one screen at €59 is the size.
• One extra screen appears on most evenings. The communal set with a single personal device beside it — two screens at €89, and the size most orders land on.
• Every slot is busy at the peak. Different rooms, different tastes, one hour — this term at €119, which divides down further than either of the others.
• Four or more, week after week. Do not force it into three — tell us the true figure and it gets sized properly before any year is agreed.

The three figures sit side by side on the plans page. How an order runs from first message to working login is on the subscribing guide, and what the final day actually involves is on the renewal page.

Questions asked before committing to three screens