Setting Up IPTV for Parents and Grandparents

A large share of the setup calls our support desk handles are adult children configuring a service for a parent. It is the hardest version of this job, because the person using it every day did not choose it, does not want to learn an interface, and will phone you rather than us when something is wrong.

Done properly it works extremely well. Done as an afterthought it produces six months of phone calls. Here is how to do it properly.

Buy the right hardware, not the cheapest

This is the decision that determines everything else, and it is where people go wrong by trying to save fifty dollars.

Buy a purpose-built receiver. These are set-top boxes made specifically for IPTV. There is no app to install, no login screen, and no home screen full of unrelated content. You enter a portal address once during setup, and after that it behaves like the cable box they have used for twenty years: press a number, get a channel. Press the guide button, see the guide.

Expect to pay somewhere around $230 CAD. That is more than a streaming stick, and it is the correct decision anyway.

Do not use a streaming stick for this. A Fire TV Stick is excellent hardware and it is the wrong tool here. The home screen is full of promoted content, the IPTV player is one icon among many, and it is easy to end up somewhere unfamiliar with no obvious way back. It also needs a weekly reboot, which is a thing you will end up doing on visits.

Do not use the television's built-in apps. Smart TV players are the slowest and fiddliest option we support, and the setup involves a device key uploaded on a separate website. Our Smart TV guide explains why. Not the place to start for this audience.

Configure it completely before you deliver it

Set the box up at your own house, on your own Wi-Fi, and get it fully working before it goes anywhere. Then reconnect it to their network on site.

Things to do before delivery:

Trim the channel list ruthlessly. This is the single highest-impact thing you can do. A lineup of twenty-four thousand channels is unusable for someone who watches eleven of them. Hide every group except the ones they actually want, then order the remainder so the most-watched sit at the top.

Build a favourites list. Most receivers have a favourites button. Put their regular channels in it, in the order they watch them, and show them that one button.

Set the guide to their time zone. Obvious, and frequently missed. A guide showing the wrong province's times makes the whole thing feel broken.

Turn off the adult category. It is disabled by default on every account we issue, and worth confirming.

Set the buffer to five seconds. Slightly slower channel changes, considerably fewer interruptions. For this audience that trade is entirely worth it, because an interruption generates a phone call and a two-second delay does not.

Write the channel numbers down. A printed card taped inside a cupboard door, listing their channels and numbers, is more useful than any interface feature. Large type.

Get the network right

More problems come from Wi-Fi than from anything else, and a parent's house is often the worst case: an older router, provided by the ISP years ago, sitting in a basement corner.

Run a cable if you possibly can. Purpose-built receivers have an Ethernet port. A wired connection removes the single largest source of intermittent faults, and intermittent faults are exactly what you do not want to be diagnosing over the phone.

If you cannot, use the 5 GHz band and confirm the signal strength in the actual room. Our bandwidth calculator will tell you whether the speed you measure is enough for what they watch.

Check the speed on the box itself, in the room where it lives, at the time of evening they watch. Not on your phone next to the router.

For a single television watching Full HD, 15 Mbps is enough. Almost every Canadian plan clears that easily; the question is whether it reaches the far end of the house.

Choose the plan carefully

One connection is usually right. Two people watching the same television is one stream. Only buy more if there are genuinely two televisions running different things at once.

Buy a longer term. Not for the discount, though that helps, but because a twelve-month plan means nothing expires unexpectedly and nobody has to remember to renew. Set a calendar reminder for yourself a month before it ends.

Six and twelve month plans include a technician setup session. If you are not confident doing this yourself, use it. Our support team will walk through it on a call, and they do this daily.

Teach three things, not thirty

Resist the urge to demonstrate every feature. Demonstrate exactly three:

1. How to turn it on and get to live TV. Including which input the television needs to be on, written down.
2. How to change channels. The favourites button, and typing a number.
3. How to get back if something goes wrong. Usually one button. Show it three times.

Everything else can be learned later or never. The goal is that the television works the way it always has, not that they understand IPTV.

Plan for the thing that will go wrong

Something will eventually. The most likely candidates, in order:

The television is on the wrong input. By a wide margin the most common call. Tape the input name to the remote.

The box was unplugged. Cleaning, a power cut, a rearranged room. Show them what the power light looks like when it is working.

The internet is down. Not your problem to fix, but worth being able to diagnose quickly. If their phone cannot load a webpage on Wi-Fi, it is the connection, not the box.

A channel is temporarily down at source. Happens occasionally, resolves within hours. Worth mentioning once so it is not alarming.

Leave our support number by the television. Our desk runs from 8:00 AM to midnight Eastern, seven days a week, and is entirely used to walking people through this patiently. That is a better first call than you, at work.

What this costs, all in

A realistic total for setting up a parent properly:

Against a typical Canadian cable bill of $90 to $170 a month for a single-television household, that pays for itself inside the first quarter, and the second year costs less than a single month of cable.

The honest caveat

If the person you are setting this up for is genuinely resistant to any change, or if you live far enough away that you cannot visit when something breaks, think carefully. Traditional cable has a technician who will attend, and a regulated complaints process through the CCTS↗ that we are not subject to. For some households that is worth the price difference, and it would be dishonest of us to pretend otherwise.

Where it does work, it works well. The receiver route in particular is close to indistinguishable from cable in daily use, which is exactly the point.

Related reading

• Set-top box setup guide, step by step
• All device guides
• Plans and pricing
• Support centre, including the eight problems we actually see