Recently, various P2P platforms have become widely popular tools for delivering both real-time and on-demand video services over the internet. However, these P2P TV approaches do experience some limitations, which adversely affect their performance. For instance, most P2P applications are designed to balance CPU load and memory but not network resources or vice versa. Through an experimental-based study and simulation, this paper unveils strengths and shortcomings of these tools and suggests methods for improving the P2P IPTV performance. The findings are based on the analysis of traffic traces from P2P streaming applications such as Zattoo, Joost, Sopcast and Babelgum and the simulation of the proposed approach