The growing demand on IPTV as well as the strong adoption of smart devices as tablets and smartphones in presence of broadband wireless technologies as LTE, leads to increasing challenges on the need to authenticate media content to be delivered specially over wireless networks. In this paper, we focus on security areas in IPTV networks specially authentication schemes. In general, a short survey is held for IPTV authentication schemes versus challenges of transmission media. In addition, mathematical modelling is held for seven authentication schemes and their respective performance impact against referential metrics including processing capabilities and existing algorithms limitations. Moreover, comparisons are done among the considered schemes in light of four performance metrics namely computational cost, communication overhead, receiver buffer size, and authentication delay.