IPTV London, Ontario: Live TV and a TV Guide on Local Time

A TV guide on London time, and the "London, England" trap

King IPTV's TV guide shows what is on now and next for every channel, and it lists those shows in London's local time once your device is set to Eastern. The guide has no idea which city you live in. It reads the clock and time zone on your TV, stick or phone, then shifts every listing to match.

That is where London viewers get caught. Many devices list time zones by city, and the "London" in those menus is the one in England. Pick it and the clock on screen runs 5 hours ahead of you, so the 6 p.m. news shows up at 11 p.m. and a 7 p.m. puck drop moves to midnight. For a few weeks each spring and fall, when the UK and Canada change their clocks on different weekends, the gap is 4 hours instead.

On a Fire TV Stick, the setting lives under Settings, Preferences, Time Zone. On Android TV and Google TV, open Settings, System, Date and time. Turn on the automatic time zone if you see it, or choose Eastern by hand. Once the device is right, leave the time shift in TiviMate or IPTV Smarters Pro at 0. Our article on fixing an IPTV guide that is blank or wrong covers the rarer causes.

Detroit sits about 200 km away on the same clock, so the East Coast versions of American channels line up with London exactly. A show that starts at 8 p.m. in Detroit starts at 8 p.m. on your couch. The guide is also the quickest answer to "what is on TV in London tonight". Open it, scroll through the hour, or search by show or team name.

Old North and Wortley Village: Wi-Fi in a century home

In a house built around 1900, the walls hold back Wi-Fi far more than the internet line does. Wortley Village, Old North and Woodfield are full of Victorian and Edwardian homes with brick outer walls, plaster on wood lath inside, and two or three floors stacked over an old basement. Each layer soaks up signal, and where plaster was laid over metal mesh, 5 GHz can barely get through.

The classic sign: the stream is perfect on a laptop beside the router but freezes on the bedroom TV two floors up. A phone showing one bar of Wi-Fi where the TV sits tells the same story. Work through these fixes in order:

1. Move the router to the middle of the house. Modems often end up in a front-room corner where the line came in. A central hallway on the main floor, close to the stairs, reaches up and down much better.
2. Add a mesh kit with one unit per floor. Set each unit on a stair landing within sight of the stairwell, since open stairs pass signal better than plaster does.
3. Wire the main TV. A flat Ethernet cable can hide under a baseboard or run up the side of the stairs. A Fire TV Stick needs a small Ethernet adapter for this.
4. Reuse old cable outlets. Many older homes had coax added for cable TV decades ago, and MoCA adapters turn it into a wired link, as our Brampton notes on basement TVs explain.
5. Keep the attic or basement TV on 2.4 GHz if it has to stay wireless. That band carries less speed but passes through floors more easily.

Brick-and-plaster houses in Old East Village and the streets near Richmond Row behave the same way. Newer drywall homes in the north and south ends rarely need more than a well-placed router, though a large two-storey with a finished basement still gains from a second access point.

Western and Fanshawe students: one login, split between roommates

A shared student house can split one multi-screen plan, which brings the cost down to a few dollars a month each. London has a large student population: Western University counts more than 40,000 students with its affiliated colleges (Western key facts), and Fanshawe College adds thousands more at its east-end and downtown campuses.

A few house rules keep it fair and simple:

• Count real viewing, not people. A screen only counts while it plays, so if your house rarely watches at the same moment, a 3-screen plan can cover four or five roommates.
• One person pays. They send the Interac e-Transfer, and the others pay them back the same way.
• Nothing renews when the lease ends. The plan stops on its end date, so nobody finds a surprise charge after moving out in April.
• Mind your data on the bus. Watching on an LTC bus to campus runs on mobile data, and an hour of HD can eat a couple of gigabytes. Lower the quality in the app, or save films for the house Wi-Fi.

Our answer on using IPTV on several devices at once explains exactly how screens are counted.