IPTV Streaming Platform
Personal Hobby Project & Technical Exploration
A fully featured IPTV streaming application built purely for fun, featuring real time SSE based live chat, HLS video streaming, stream health validation, license verification, and a polished dark themed UI with Framer Motion animations.
Project Overview
Role: Full-Stack Engineer
Duration: Ongoing
Team: Solo Project
Year: 2025
Technologies Used
Project Details
A comprehensive hobby project exploring the technical challenges of building a production grade streaming platform. This application combines real time Server Sent Events for live chat, HLS.js video streaming with intelligent error recovery, automated stream health validation with CORS and geo blocking detection, a multi tier license verification system, and persistent user features like favorites and watch history all wrapped in a responsive, YouTube inspired interface built with Next.js 16, React 19, and Tailwind CSS.
Challenge
Build a complete IPTV streaming platform from scratch that handles live HLS video playback with fallback strategies, implements real time chat without WebSocket infrastructure, validates thousands of streams for health and browser compatibility, verifies content licensing status, and delivers a polished user experience with favorites, watch history, and intuitive channel discovery all while maintaining clean architecture and responsive design.
Solution
Developed with Next.js 16 using the App Router, React 19, and Zustand for state management. Implemented Server Sent Events for real time chat with per channel rooms, viewer counts, and rate limiting. Built a custom HLS player with intelligent buffer management, CORS detection, and VLC integration fallback. Created automated validation scripts for stream health checking and multi tier license verification. Designed a YouTube inspired UI with Framer Motion animations, infinite scroll, and category based navigation. The application is not online due to licensing limitations, and the repository remains private due to legal considerations around IPTV related code.
Key Features
- Watch live TV with automatic quality switching and 90 second buffer
- Chat with other viewers in real-time channel rooms
- Browse hundreds of channels by category, country, or language
- Save favorites and export/import them as JSON
- Track recently watched with automatic history
- Open in VLC when browser playback fails
- Filter by stream health and browser compatibility
- See viewer counts and channel popularity
Results & Impact
- ✓
Built custom HLS player handling CORS failures, codec mismatches, and geo-blocked streams with VLC fallback
- ✓
Implemented real-time chat using SSE instead of WebSockets, reducing infrastructure complexity
- ✓
Created validation pipeline that tests stream health, browser compatibility, and licensing status
- ✓
Designed Zustand state architecture managing player state, chat rooms, favorites, and watch history
- ✓
Solved stream URL obfuscation by parsing M3U8 manifests and extracting direct media endpoints