Yes, but not because a VPN blocks streaming on purpose. Surfshark not working with IPTV is almost always a side effect of three settings: a kill switch that cuts all traffic the instant the VPN drops for a moment, DNS leak protection that forces your device to use the VPN's own DNS resolver instead of one that can reach your provider's servers cleanly, and server distance, since every extra hop adds latency. None of these are IPTV-specific bugs. They're VPN behaviors that happen to collide with how a live stream is delivered.

A live channel doesn't arrive as one continuous file. It comes in small segments of about 6 seconds each, and your player keeps a short buffer of them ready to play. If a VPN hop adds enough delay or drops packets, segments arrive later than they're needed and the picture freezes right at that gap, then catches up once the next segment lands. That stutter-and-catch-up pattern, rather than a hard crash or a blank screen, is the signature of a routing problem sitting between your device and the stream, not a broken app or a bad channel. It shows up more on 4K streams, since they need a steadier 15-25 Mbps than standard definition does.

If Surfshark is set up on your router or as a system-wide profile, it routes every device on the network the same way, including your Firestick or smart TV. A phone on cellular data or a different Wi-Fi band can end up on a completely different path to the same VPN server, sometimes through a different local gateway entirely. That's why one device streams cleanly while another stalls: they're not actually taking the same route to the same server, even though the VPN app looks identical on both, and the settings screen gives no hint that the paths differ underneath it.

Split tunneling lets you pick which apps or devices go through the VPN and which use your normal connection directly. If Surfshark supports it on your platform, excluding your IPTV app or streaming device removes the VPN from that specific path entirely, while everything else on your network stays protected behind it. It's the cleanest fix when you don't want to turn the VPN off completely just to watch, since you keep the encryption on your other traffic and only give up the tunnel for the one app that needs a direct, low-latency path. Not every platform exposes the option, so check your VPN app's settings menu first.

Some buffering has nothing to do with your VPN, your Wi-Fi, or your player app. It's oversold server capacity on the provider's side, and no local setting reaches it because the bottleneck sits upstream of your entire connection. That's a reason to check what uptime a service actually publishes rather than guessing. IP4KTV runs at 99.99% uptime, which works out to about 53 minutes of downtime a year, and that number is checkable against your own experience over time in a way a marketing claim isn't. If a provider won't state an uptime figure at all, treat that as information too.