It's not the total number of channels a provider lists anywhere in its marketing. What actually decides quality is whether the EPG data is tagged in the right language, so the on-screen guide shows accurate show names and air times instead of blank or mismatched entries, and whether the stream routes through a server close enough to keep buffering low. A huge catalog paired with poor EPG tagging or a distant server still frustrates, no matter how many titles are technically available somewhere in the system. Checking these two things on the specific channels you actually watch tells you far more than any headline channel count ever will.

No. A Firestick plays a regional-language stream the exact same way it plays anything else, through a player app reading your playlist or an Xtream Codes login (a username, password and URL combination many IPTV accounts use to authenticate). The channel's language has no effect whatsoever on which hardware you need to run it; it only affects whether the EPG and subtitle data attached to that particular channel are complete and accurate. If a Firestick already runs your other streaming apps without trouble, it will run a regional-language channel list the same way, since the underlying playback technology doesn't change based on language.

Subtitles are only available if the stream itself actually carries a subtitle track, and whether it does depends entirely on the source feeding that channel, not on the player app you happen to be using. Most player apps show a subtitle toggle somewhere in the playback menu whenever a track exists on the current stream, and that same toggle is grayed out or simply does nothing when one doesn't. If subtitles matter to you, check that toggle on the specific channel you plan to watch before assuming subtitles are missing across the whole service, since availability can vary channel by channel rather than being all-or-nothing.

Player apps hold the entire visible channel list in memory the whole time they're running, and performance noticeably drops once that list grows past roughly 18,000 visible channels, regardless of how powerful the Firestick itself is. Hiding groups you never watch, including entire regional or language groups that fall outside your interest, is a genuine fix for this, not just a cosmetic cleanup, because it directly shrinks what the app has to keep loaded and track in memory at any given moment. A shorter, curated list also makes it faster to actually find the Tamil-language channels you care about instead of scrolling past thousands you'll never open.