What Twiga can’t do

What Twiga can’t do

It can’t hand you channels. Twiga is relay software you point at a subscription you already pay for — the wire, not the content. You bring your own M3U or Xtream source; Twiga plays it. It isn’t a content provider, and there is no catalogue to buy from us.

It can’t play more than one stream at once. One playback per account, by design — open a second and the first stops. That’s the single-stream architecture, not a limit we’ll quietly lift; it’s the shape of the product.

It can’t unlock your list if you lose both your key and your recovery code. Nobody can — us included. The list is sealed with a key only you hold; there’s no reset email and no back door, because a door for you is a door for whoever shows up dressed as you. Today there’s no self-serve restore flow, either. Your account and email survive; the list doesn’t. Keep the code somewhere your key isn’t.

It can’t fix a stream your browser genuinely can’t decode. The server is a blind relay — no server-side transcode, no catch-up, no recording — so every codec is decoded on your device. Where your browser has a decoder for what a channel uses, it plays; where it doesn’t, some formats on some browsers hit an honest terminal failure rather than a faked picture. We’d rather say so than show you a black screen pretending to load.

It can’t hide from your provider that its own credentials are in use. Your provider stops seeing your home IP — it sees one of Twiga’s VPN exits instead — but it still sees its account active and every request that account makes. Twiga moves who sees your IP, not who owns the account.

And it can’t promise an M3U link never leaves your device. The URL usually carries your login, and the playlist behind it has to be fetched before there’s anything to seal — so the link reaches our server once, held in RAM for a single outbound fetch, then dropped. The honest claim for M3U is “never stored”, not “never leaves your device”. Only an Xtream login stays fully client-side; the whole distinction is spelled out on is it safe to give us your credentials?

What it doesn’t have yet

No iPhone or Mac app, and no Apple TV. The player runs in your browser today, and there’s an Android TV app in open beta — same relay, same vault, on the big screen. More TV platforms follow; we’ll name one when it’s real, not before.

And Twiga is still in beta. It’s free while it is, and we haven’t promised a final price. When paid plans land, beta users get notice first.

What’s verifiably true — and how to check us

The limits above are the cost of a design that’s built to be checked, not taken on faith. Each claim below comes with the step an outsider can run to confirm it.

Every codec is decoded in your browser; the server relays opaque bytes. Open your browser’s DevTools while a channel plays: the server’s stream responses are raw MPEG-TS, and the WebAssembly decoders load and run in the page. Nothing on the relay reads what you watch, because there’s no decoder on it to read with.

Your provider sees a VPN exit, never your home IP. The player shows the exit your streams leave from; check it against what your provider-side panel reports as the connecting address — they match the exit, not you.

Your list is sealed on your device; the server holds only ciphertext and a public key. In the DevTools network tab, watch a source get added: the seal payload that uploads is ciphertext, and no password crosses the wire — sign-in is challenge–response, a signature, not a secret.

The guide is fetched over Tor; streams and playlist refreshes leave via the VPN exits. Any one of these you could find on its own. What Twiga does is hold all four at once — in-browser decode, a blind relay, a list sealed with your key, and VPN-exit routing on the provider side — in a browser tab. Each piece is checkable on its own; the point is that they hold at the same time.

Quick answers

Does Twiga give me channels or a subscription?

No. Twiga is relay software, not a content provider — it’s the wire, not the subscription. You bring your own M3U or Xtream source from a provider you already pay for, and Twiga plays it. It sells no channels and hands out no logins.

Can I watch two channels at once on Twiga?

No. Twiga plays one stream at a time per account — one playback, by design. Open a second and the first stops. It’s a deliberate limit of the single-stream architecture, not a bug you can work around.

What happens if I lose my key and my recovery code?

Your channel list can’t be unsealed — not by you, not by us, not by anyone we could be compelled to help. The list is sealed with a key only you hold, and there is no reset email and no back door. Your account and email survive; the list doesn’t.

Does Twiga hide from my provider that I’m using its subscription?

No. Your provider stops seeing your home IP — it sees Twiga’s VPN exit instead — but it still sees its own account active and every request that account makes. Twiga moves who sees your IP, not who owns the account.