In the US, most of what people call local channels are affiliate stations: a hometown broadcaster that carries a national network's shows plus its own local news, weather, and sports. The network part is national; the local part is tied to one metro area. Cable and antennas deliver whichever affiliate serves your region automatically, because both are regional by nature. Internet delivery is not — an IPTV service has no idea where you live and carries specific feeds, not regions. So when a lineup includes big-network programming, it is usually through the affiliates of a handful of major cities. Whether your city's version is there is a separate question from whether the network is there, and it is the question that actually matters to you.

Simple math of supply. A national channel has one feed that millions want, so every service carries it. A small-market affiliate is watched almost entirely by people in one metro area — the audience for that specific feed, on a service sold worldwide, is tiny. Lineups get built to serve the most viewers per feed, which means the largest cities get covered first and deepest. This is not unique to any one provider; it is the shape of the whole category, and it is why no honest service answers this question with a blanket yes. If your local stations are from a top-ten metro, your odds are decent. The smaller your market, the more important it is to verify before you pay anything meaningful.

Take a trial and go look — it is a 15-minute job. Search the channel list for your city's name and your stations' call letters, the four-letter codes US stations go by. Check the city label on what you find, because a network feed from another metro shows the same shows but the wrong local news. Then play the feed at a local news hour and confirm you are seeing your area's anchors and weather map. IP4KTV's trial costs $5 for 24 hours, which covers an evening news cycle. If you move to the 12-month plan at $10 a month, there is still a 7-day money-back window, nothing auto-renews, and no card is stored.

1. 1Search by city name and station call letters
2. 2Confirm the city label, not just the network name
3. 3Watch at a local news hour to be sure it is your market

An antenna, and the combination is better than it sounds. Local affiliates broadcast over the air without charge in nearly every US market — a one-off antenna purchase pulls in exactly the stations that are hardest for internet services to carry, in original quality. Pair that with IPTV for everything else and you cover both ends: hyper-local content from the source, and 54,000+ channels of national and international programming for $10 a month on the 12-month plan. Compare that pairing against typical US cable or satellite at $70-130 every month, where the local stations are bundled in but you pay that premium for them twelve times a year, every year.