This site was about Bristol in 2050. Now it sells IPTV for £3.85 a month.
Both of those things are true, and pretending otherwise would be weird. Here is what bristol2050.org.uk originally was, the moment the audience changed its mind for us, and how a city-futures blog became a UK IPTV service.
Bristol 2050: a city-futures project, not a shop
If you came here from an old bookmark and expected maps of the harbour, you are not going mad.
In 2020, bristol2050.org.uk was a project about the future of one city. Not a business — a series of long reads, hand-drawn maps and arguments about what Bristol might plausibly look like in 2050 if the decisions went well, and what it would look like if they didn't.
The subjects were unglamorous and local: how Temple Quarter would actually be built out, whether the Cumberland Basin could be reworked without cutting the city in half, how much tree cover a dense neighbourhood needs before it stops being a heat trap, why the bus network kept losing passengers to a 20-minute walk, and what "affordable" was supposed to mean when the average one-bed in Bedminster started costing more than a house did in 2005.
We wrote about the Avon, the harbour, the Gloucester Road independents, the Suspension Bridge lit up at night, the M32 as a scar and the cycle routes that stop dead at the worst possible junction. We interviewed planners, bus drivers, allotment secretaries and one extremely patient man from the harbour authority. The tagline was simple: Bristol, in 2050, if we get it right.
The one column that didn't fit was called What We Watched — a Friday note about telly. Broadband speeds, the 3pm football blackout, why a stream froze exactly as the second half kicked off, which £8 router was quietly ruining somebody's evening in St George. It was supposed to be light relief between the planning pieces. It became the most-read thing on the site within four months.
What the analytics said, in public
We spent five years arguing that Bristol's future deserved serious attention. Then our own readership stats told us where the attention actually went.
20 : 1
Our streaming pieces out-read the planning pieces roughly twenty to one, every month from 2022 onwards.
68%
Of search traffic by 2023 arrived on a page about watching live football without a dish — not on the city work.
£0
What the city-futures writing ever earned. The hosting bill, meanwhile, was real and arrived every month.
The honest sentence we kept avoiding
Readers didn't want to read about how the city might watch television in 2050. They wanted to watch football tonight, for less money, without a freezing picture. Once we said that out loud, the rest of the plan wrote itself.
How a Bristol city blog quietly became an IPTV service
Straight from the site's own news archive — the short version of five years of drift, told in order.
Bristol 2050 goes live
Launched as a lockdown project between two friends in Bedminster and one in Easton. Three articles, one hand-drawn map of the harbour, and a promise to write about the city's future without using the word "vibrant".
The first "What We Watched" column
A Friday post about a frozen stream during a Champions League night. Nobody involved expected a telly column on a planning site to be the thing that grew. It was shared more in a week than every city piece combined had been in nine months.
40,000 readers, mostly for the wrong reason
The audience split in two: a loyal, small group reading the Bristol 2050 series, and a much larger, noisier group arriving via search for "best way to watch football without Sky". We started publishing both on the same site and pretending that was a strategy.
The broadband testing year
We bought seven routers, sat on three different providers and logged buffering across 200+ peak-time matches, publishing the numbers like the planning data we were used to. The piece explaining why streams die at 8pm became the site's most-read article of the year — and our first taste of doing something useful rather than something worthy.
The point where the tail took the dog for a walk
The streaming archive outgrew the city archive. Search traffic was 91% sports and telly. Our inbox was, weekly: "You clearly know who is reliable — can you just sort it for us?" We said no for a year. It was, in hindsight, a year of saying no to our own readers.
First proper server, first real service
Not a reseller link: we rented capacity in London, built our own playlists, wrote a support rota and started handing out logins to people who had been reading the blog for years. The 24-hour test existed from week one, because a Bristol audience will not tolerate being sold something untested in public.
The sports emphasis
Peak-time capacity was the only thing anyone complained about, so it became the only thing we spent on. Anti-freeze routing, world feeds for blacked-out kick-offs, and an EPG that actually matched the schedules. Support moved fully to WhatsApp after we worked out that email tickets were mostly people testing whether a human existed.
The pivot, done deliberately
bristol2050.org.uk relaunched as an IPTV service under the name Bristol2050 TV. The city-futures archive stayed live and unedited — still the reason the domain exists. New publishing focused on the questions readers were asking: how to test an IPTV provider, how to spot fake 4K, how the 3pm blackout works, what a fair price looks like.
40,000+ channels and the £3.85 experiment
We added worldwide capacity: 40,000+ channels from 120+ countries, 80,000 films and series, and real 4K on selected broadcasts. Then, instead of a discount coupon, we tried the bluntest offer we could think of — a 24-month term at £3.85 per month (£92.40 once) to see whether a genuinely cheap price would repair the reputation cheap IPTV has earned.
Still in Bristol, still publishing the numbers
Same office, same three people, same refusal to write "vibrant". The city articles still get updated when the harbour plans change — and the 24-hour test is still free, still cardless, and still the only way we ask anyone to judge us. Ask for one here.
Four habits from the old site that run the new one
Publish the numbers
Back then it was tree cover and bus frequency. Now it is server locations, honest speed requirements and what the £3.85 actually covers.
Say the awkward part
The £3.85 is a promotional term, not the standard rate. The blackout exists. Fake 4K sellers exist. A page that hides that is worse than useless.
Let people test it
A Bristol planning argument lives or dies in consultation. A streaming service lives or dies on a Saturday at 3pm. So we hand out 24 hours of it, free, no card.
Stay local about support
Real people, British hours, minutes not days. Nobody here reads from a script, which is why one of our replies last week was: "Yes, that's a router problem, not ours."
Three people and a support rota
The one who writes
Ex-local news, then planning comms, then this. Writes every page, fact-checks the guides, and is responsible for the phrase "don't pay for anything you haven't tested on a Saturday".
The one who builds
Runs the London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam boxes, watches CPU graphs during derby weekends, and once rebuilt the whole routing setup because one customer in Redland had a bad evening.
The one who answers
Your WhatsApp messages, usually within minutes, between 8am and 11pm UK time. Can talk you through a Firestick blindfolded and will tell you honestly when your problem is your broadband.
The questions this page always gets
So what was this website before it sold IPTV?
A Bristol city-futures project. From 2020 we published long reads and maps about what Bristol might look like in 2050 — the harbour, Temple Quarter, transport, housing density, tree cover, the Cumberland Basin — plus a very popular weekly "what we watched" column about streaming in British homes.
Why did a city blog turn into an IPTV service?
Because the traffic told us the truth. Our streaming and broadband pieces outperformed the planning articles by roughly twenty to one. Readers kept asking which service we used and whether we could get them access. In 2025 we stopped pretending and did exactly that.
Did you delete the old Bristol content?
No. The city work is still the reason the domain exists, and we keep the archive and the local values it gave us: plain English, published numbers and no pretending that everything is fine. What changed is what we sell, not how we write.
Who runs the site now?
Three people in Bristol plus a small support rota. One builds the servers, one answers WhatsApp messages and one writes the pages you are reading. There is no call centre and no sales team.
Come for the football, stay because it works
Whatever brought you here — an old bookmark about the harbour, or a search for cheap IPTV — the door test is the same: 24 hours, the full channel list, no card.
Get my free 24-hour test