IPTV Cost Calculator — What US TV Actually Costs in 2026

Why this calculator exists

Most cost comparisons in this category are written by whoever wants to sell you the cheaper option, and the numbers are asserted rather than sourced. This site has been guilty of it: its own comparison tables were flagged as unverified during an internal audit and still carry that caveat. The same audit is why this site publishes no star ratings or testimonials.

So the rule for this page is narrow and checkable. A price only appears if it carries a source link and the date it was checked. Where the honest answer is a range — cable is priced by ZIP code, promotional period and package — it is stored as a range and shown as one, instead of being flattened into a single confident-looking number.

The fees that are not in the advertised price

The gap between the cable price you are quoted and the bill that arrives is mostly three line items. A broadcast TV fee of $15–$25 covers the local channels that are free over the air. A regional sports fee of $8–$15 is charged whether or not you watch the regional sports network. Equipment rental runs $10–$35 per box, so a three-TV household pays it three times.

Together they turn an advertised $100–$120 package into a $130–$170 bill. One change worth knowing about: Xfinity stopped itemising the broadcast and regional sports fees in early 2026 and folded them into package pricing instead, so a like-for-like comparison against an older quote will understate what changed.

Sources

Every row in the calculator, its price, and where the price came from. Checked 24 August 2026.

What this calculator does not tell you

It compares prices, not entitlements. A cable package, a live TV streaming service and an IPTV subscription are not the same product with different price tags — they differ in what they are licensed to carry, what happens when a rights deal changes, and what recourse you have when a stream fails during a game. The arithmetic here is the easy part of the decision, and it is deliberately the only part this page claims to answer.

Two things worth reading before treating a price gap as a like-for-like saving: where IPTV sits legally in the US, and what a trial actually proves about a service before you pay for a year of it.

Methodology

So this is repeatable rather than a one-off snapshot, here is exactly how the table is built and maintained.

1. The basket is fixed. The same 18 line items are re-priced each time, so quarter-on-quarter movement means something. Adding a service mid-series would make the trend meaningless, so new services start their own row from zero rather than being backfilled.
2. Provider page first, publication second. Every row is marked primary or secondaryin the table above. Primary means the price came from the provider's own published page. Secondary means a publication reported it and we could not reach the provider directly — most streaming pricing pages are geo-gated or reject non-browser clients, which is a genuine limit on this dataset and is marked rather than hidden.
3. Ad-free tiers, one household, no promotional pricing. Intro offers distort a comparison because they expire; the standing rate is what a household actually pays across a year. Where an intro price exists it is mentioned in the row note but not used in the arithmetic.
4. Genuine variability stays a range. Cable is priced by ZIP code, promotional period and package count. Those rows are stored as a low and a high and displayed as both, and the calculator has a toggle for which end to total.
5. Corrections are logged, not quietly edited. See below.

Changelog

• 24 August 2026 — NFL Sunday Ticket corrected against YouTube's own page. The launch figure widely reported by secondary sources ($192 for new YouTube TV subscribers) is not what the provider lists — new subscribers pay $240 either way, and returning standalone is $480, not the $40/mo some coverage quoted. Row upgraded to a primary source.
• 24 August 2026 — Dataset created — 18 rows, every one carrying a source link and an as-of date.

Keeping it honest

Streaming prices move several times a year — ESPN Unlimited alone goes from $29.99 to $31.99 on 17 September 2026, and Paramount+ raised new-subscriber pricing in January. Every row above is dated so you can see how stale it is rather than having to guess. If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong in a way you can check against the source link next to it, which is the whole point.