At a technical level, an IPTV channel is really just a continuous encoded video stream sitting on a server that a player app can connect to and read at will. Making one means running an encoder to convert a video source, whether live or file-based, into a streaming-compatible format, hosting that resulting stream on a server with enough bandwidth to serve every simultaneous viewer without buckling, and generating the playlist plus EPG data a player app expects to find when it connects. None of that is plug-and-play in the way installing an app is; it's closer to running a small broadcast operation than it is to adjusting a single setting somewhere.

A 1080p live stream typically needs 5-8 Mbps of sustained bandwidth and uses about 3 GB of data an hour of runtime; 4K needs roughly 15-25 Mbps and about 7 GB an hour by comparison. Using HEVC encoding instead of the older H.264 format roughly halves that bitrate requirement for the same delivered picture quality, which matters once you're planning server capacity. Multiply whichever bitrate applies by however many viewers you expect to serve at the same time, and that total is the outbound bandwidth your server genuinely needs to sustain without the stream stalling for anyone watching.

If you're rebroadcasting content you didn't produce yourself, licensing rights attach to the content and the specific service delivering it, not to the underlying delivery method used to move it. IPTV as a technology, meaning television delivered over internet protocol, is lawful on its own; whether you personally have the right to stream a specific piece of content is a completely separate question that depends on what that content is and where you actually got it from. Anyone building a channel around content they don't own needs to sort that question out before going further with the technical build, not after it's already running.

If the actual goal is watching a wide range of channels rather than broadcasting your own original content to other people, building the infrastructure described above is solving a problem you genuinely don't have. A subscription service already runs the encoding, server and playlist generation on its end, and you connect a player app like IPTV Smarters or TiviMate to it the same basic way you would connect to a channel you built entirely yourself, just without the server bill, the bandwidth planning or the licensing research attached to it.