Hifi, short for high fidelity, technically describes lossless or near-lossless audio, meaning nothing in the sound gets thrown away to shrink the file. Dedicated music platforms are built around that standard specifically. Live TV and movie streaming services, IPTV included, generally use compressed audio alongside compressed video, because the whole stream, picture and sound together, has to fit inside a bandwidth budget your connection can actually sustain in real time. That's a reasonable tradeoff for TV, where picture quality usually matters more to the average viewer than lossless sound, but it's worth naming plainly rather than letting the word "hifi" imply something the service was never built to deliver.

Yes, indirectly. HEVC-encoded video streams use roughly half the bitrate of older H.264 streams for the same picture quality, which frees up headroom in the overall stream. Some of that headroom can go toward a cleaner audio track instead of squeezing it down further. This is why two streams claiming the same resolution can sound noticeably different: the codec and the total bitrate budget matter as much as the label on the box. A player app that supports HEVC playback is worth checking for on your device, since not every older box decodes it the same way.

For 1080p, plan on roughly 5 to 8 Mbps of steady bandwidth, using about 3 GB an hour. For 4K, that rises to about 15 to 25 Mbps, close to 7 GB an hour. A connection that dips below these numbers during peak hours is the more common cause of muddy audio or a dropped soundtrack than anything about the app or the service itself, since audio and video share the same pipe and both suffer together when bandwidth gets tight. A wired Ethernet connection to your streaming box removes a lot of that variability compared with a shared Wi-Fi signal during busy evening hours.

If lossless music quality is genuinely what you're after, that's a dedicated music-streaming category, separate from a live TV or movie subscription, and it's worth treating as its own purchase decision with its own criteria. If what you actually want is the cleanest sound your TV subscription can deliver alongside good picture quality, the numbers that matter are bitrate, codec, and a stable connection, not a "hifi" label on a service that was never built around lossless audio in the first place. Ask what codec a TV service uses and what bandwidth it recommends before assuming a higher price automatically buys better sound.