BACKROUND:

SS was used the month prior to this one, as i wanted to wait until I had a bigger comparative sample size before making any final evaluations here. My sub was run by itself and without any other paid service for the entire duration. If it wasn't doing what I wanted/needed it to do free addons were the only fall back option. SS was run exclusively on the latest SPMC at the time (16.5.5), on wired 60mbps internet, and through either my Nvidia Shield or 4k FireTV2. While I don't consider myself Mr. Tech or anything, I have done enough research/tinkering that I'm confident that any trouble shooting done was both accurate and with every possibility exhausted to best isolate the issue.

My viewing times/habits are as follows: Wed - Sat I'd watch maybe an hour or 2 of ESPNs/FOXSPORTSs/MLB/WWE channels in the afternoon before work, then another 3-4 hours afterwards (usually 11pm est on) with random movie channel surfing mixed in. Sun - Tues I have completely off, so it would probably be used or running in the backround most of those days. I watch all the UFC and WWE PPVs, and at the time Celtic games. All in all I'd estimate that this review is based on roughly 200+ hours of testing.

SETUP:

Setup was mostly straight forward, although with a little more hoop jumping then you'll usually find elsewhere. They get points there for having an active live chat to fall back on though, which I ended up using for confirmation that I actually needed to sign up through a different website then the first one I had registered and paid through.

Where this fails miserably though is that after you do follow through with the provided setup instructions, you then have to turn around and delete *every trace of that install (which I found to be kind of a pita btw, and just choose to put it on a fresh start kodi instead) and then install it though a 3rd party repo like everybody else using SS does. More on that below.

EPG:

Initial installation from the official repo leaves most of the entertainment channel listings empty, and the only fix to that is a 3rd party installation version from a guy who should really be on SS's payroll if he isn't already. This goes on to fill in those active channel slots with mostly correct and updated information on what should officially be on.

While the above fix does serve to make SS's EPG at least somewhat competitive against the growing standard elsewhere, as a whole it is still...well quite a mess. For starters the time line that goes down the middle of the guide would only update on start ups, so I'd find myself having to exit out of the addon and re-enter anytime i wanted to do that. Not a huge deal or anything, but it certainly added an inconvenience factor over what I've used elsewhere.

Accuracy is all over the place, due to combination of limited channel slots and the need to overwrite channels in the name of fulfilling their promise to cover every single sporting event (they do). Click on USA during prime time thinking you are going to watch Goonies...random Soccer game. TNT might get you Hockey, MLB channel Horse racing, ect ect. Granted this wasn't too big a deal for me given that a large % of my viewing was late night, but for you more normal hour folks it's certainly a serious consideration factor. There is a sports-first trade off being made there that a simple look at their channel list isn't going to tell you.

Also of note was a direct recording option in the guide which I only got to work once out of 3 times, but didn't really make the serious effort to trouble shoot a solution since I just use Kodi for all my VOD needs anyway. It was pretty sweet that one time I did get it to tape Belletor in full though, but I obviously don't feel qualified to comment on whether it's a working selling point or not.

CHANNELS/QUALITY/RELIABILITY:

Channel offering are rather limited, as it mostly just focuses on US content. That said, I honestly didn't find this to be much on an issue as what they did offer in terms of entertainment offerings covered the bases enough for me. All of the most popular and major US stuff was present. I'm not a more is better type of guy, and never once during my sub did I find myself thinking "Gee, I wish I had 100 more UK channels I'd never watch anyway". The overwrite tendancy never effected what I made it a point to watch live either, such as WWE Raw/Smackdown, Walking Dead, ect.

Rarely mentioned anywhere but worthy of note is the load up time, which is the best I've seen on any service. Load SPMC/Kodi, click on SS, and boom...guide. Which i actually kind of preferred over the otherwise standard installs elsewhere that leaves you going through an activated LIVE TV menu and then waiting X amount of time for the service to fully load every time you open Kodi (long load times were deal breakers for me on 2 fairly popular services around here that I did a one day trial on). Picture quality was also solid, which was about par for the course in comparison to any of the better services out there. Lots of 720p feeds, ect. SS was also one of the best services I've used in terms of keeping their service up, and beyond those select versions of HBO/Cinemax/SHOWTIME that every single other service out there struggles with too, providing feeds that work when you click on them.

Of course the catch to that above, because there always has to be a catch, is that SS has a nasty little habit of routinely kicking you out of a channel and back to the guide. This was always remedied by simply clicking back in, but I can tell you now that i probably did this 1000 times during my one month sub. Which I'm hardly alone in claiming that either, as with a little searching around you'll find various threads here and there with people complaining about it. I experienced it, my mom's setup did it, and my 2 friends who bought their own SS account that month had it. It's definitely a thing, depending on one's patience level for that type of annoyance factor. I personally just got in the habit of doing it. My Mom gave up on it after a few days.

As far as high traffic PPVs go, all 3 of my experiences were a complete bust. THE UFC PPV feed was an utter mess, buffering and lagging to the point that at times it was skipping around to random points that had already happened 2 hours previously. WWE events were more of the same, minus the skipping around. This was all done while also frantically checking every feed and server option, which on that latter note never did anything even outside PPVs. US east, US west, Canada, Europe...never mattered. In the 1000 times I tried to trouble shoot using that feature (since that is the first thing they'll tell you to do btw) I never once found it to "fix" anything. If a channel was buffering or didn't load, it was going to buffer or not load regardless what you picked. In fact and to be perfectly blunt, to me that feature was/is nothing more then a paper sell of the service, which essentially only serves to provide that marketing guy a plausible reason to tell you why their PPV feed ran in perfect 1080p last night when your's" didn't.

CONCLUSION

As harsh as some of my criticism above may have come across, I did almost end up deciding to give SS that bad month benefit of the doubt on the PPV fails, and renewing the service for the MLB season since I never ran into much of a problem watching the NBA. Kind of a "stick with the devil you know" pass I guess, since I ultimately never really found myself having those moments where I regretted the purchase. Which is actually kinda rare in the IPTV world for that matter and imo, especially given the unstable nature of the business.

I didn't end up renewing though for the exact flip side of that coin though. It might not have the lows you find with other services, but it also never had that "I just spent 12 hours in front of the TV and it kicked ass today" high I've found elsewhere either. In the end that ceiling potential ends up outweighing the floor for me and what I'm looking for.

As a whole SS also just seemed....a service past it's "we aren't adding anymore subs" heyday and content with what it is I guess, instead of trying to be better and evolve forward like so many other services lately. Which probably works just fine for them, with what seems to be a fairly established and loyal customer base that don't really care about such change, what else might be out there, or whether they ever actually deliver on on those coming-soon-for-like-forever-now feature improvements that are casually advertised to be right around the corner. That just wasn't me though. I mean you've been around how many years, and you still don't care enough to finish developing your own fully working guide? That in itself speaks volumes about the commitment beyond a making money aspect that you can't just spin away imo.

So yeah, for $15 and in the end I'd grade it as a PASS. There is just other options out there that make more an effort, offer more, and do it as good or better from an overall standpoint then modern day Smoothstreams does.

I've been using "iptv-subscription.net" for about 2 months or so.

It's a very cheap IPTV service, 3 months costs €14.99 and they got plenty of channels (~1400), from a lot of different countries.

But even tho the price is low I wouldn't recommend their service. I only watch UK/US channels and a lot of them buffers or stop working completely several times every week. Also when comparing to other IPTV providers the quality is pretty bad.

And who needs 1400 channels anyway when you're only going to watch ~20 channels or so. I know that I couldn't expect that much since the price is so low but I didn't expect it to go down so often.

Hi all, I've been using FabIPTV sports service for the past few weeks and I've been very happy with it. I was interested in using the service on my enigma2 box so I created bouquets and linked some of the UK channels to the epg. What I found is it would work for so long but if there was a glitch, loop, etc then the stream would freeze and I'd have to change channel up and down for it to work. Not major but a pia. On my AFTV this never happened but I really wanted to be able to utilise my enigma2 box.

By way of elimination to see of the problem was with my box I took a trial out with flawless (peace country on here but I went direct). First off their enigma2 integration is second to none. Other services try to integrate with enigma2 through various plugins or basic python scripts but none work as well as flawless.

You run a script through telnet/putty and it imports individual bouquets that when combined with epg importer gives you a full epg. I found the epg to be correct for most channels but some showed the wrong details (US channels mainly).

What was strange though is that even though it's apparent Fab and flawless use the same supplier for some channels (same G logo) I never got any of the freezing issues on my enigma2 box.

Flawless channels are better organised in that UK entertainment etc is in the correct order i.e. bbc1, bbc2 etc and the category breakdown makes sense.

The script runs every morning and adds new channels, epg data etc without any user intervention.

There are HD and SD versions of some channels so if one is down invariably the other one works.

It's not without it's faults and some channels are dark or show a different channel. A number of channels for the EPL were down but there was at least one working for each game.

The FB group is very active and responses are very quick. There is a VOD service that also works on enigma2.

Channel wise the two services are very similar and fab are adding channels daily at the moment.

Price wise fab is cheaper presently but their prices will increase next month I believe.

All in all both services are very good but I would probably have to put flawless on top because:

1. Their enigma2 integration is top notch
2. I don't get the freezing issues on my enigma2 box that I do with fab (this is only exclusive to enigma2)
3. Multiple backup channels

Without enigma2 I would more than happily stick with fab but for ease of use and that polished finish flawless better suits my needs.

I was able to get a free trial today (through /r/iptv) and mess with the service for a few hours.

I am using a dreamlink t1 box with decent enough internet to stream smooth.

Pros:

• the EPG seems fairly well put together. On the channels i land on are what the EPG say is playing

• the channels i streamed (specifically sports) have played smooth without buffering issues and freezing

• tons of channels* and almost every channel i looked for was on this service and played clearly as if it was straight from my cable company.

• seems to have all major sports packages. Im a sucker for nhl. Also seen it had nba playing.

• havent seen a provider have this before, but have quite a few local news channels from different regions. I found that pretty neat.

• on demand seemed well put together with a decent selection (both quantity and quality films

Cons:

• A couple channels i landed on seemed to have been repeating and buffering a bit.

• unsure why, but looks like some channels are repeated about 2 or 3 times. Possibly different streams or backups. Maybe someone can fill me in on this one

• higher numbered channels wouldnt really play. Id get error saying "can not play video"

• 24 hour channels didnt play at all.

Other:

• i see g4tv. I got excited but then it seemed channel was offline. I assume this is because of the canadian issues alot of providers are having around here

• channel 1 is a promo for invoke. Its on a quick bootloop and seems to restart. Not an issue at all. Figured id say a technical error that could be made aware.

Conclusion:

While i havent had long to test this service (and i have read the reviews and experiences people had before on this)... i would say you get your moneys worth for the service. It could defintely use improvement with the number of channels that werent playing. But id say if i knew the customer service was better i would completely pay for another month and use them as a alternative 2nd source to my current iptv provider.

I would rate the service 6.75/10. Its good, but there is room for alot of improvement. And i can say improvements that can be made to the service can justify a price increase.

I've been using Fab for about a week or so now as my primary provider. I have used Vader and Smoothstreams too so I think I can compare properly!

I will start off with quality . The quality is great. Most channels work fine usually (Willow seems to be having an issue though). The one really annoying issue I have had is that the American/Canadian channels especially the ones with "E" on top seems to have a slight stutter. A lot of people won't notice this but I do and it's kind of annoying to me, however as of yet it's not really a deal breaker. If not for this issue, the service would be perfect.

EDIT : Looks like they are replacing a lot of those "E" branded channels with better sources with no stuttering. This just makes it a lot better!!

The EPG is great. Works fine on Dreamlink(DOL does have it's EPG related bugs independent of the provider though)and Kodi as well as Perfect Player.

Where they really shine is the customer service. Almost everytime I have opened a ticket or posted on the FB group, I have had instant response.

Another really really cool feature (the main reason I went with them) is the ability to change mac address myself. What's even cooler is you can use it on Kodi/Perfect Player using their add-on and an M3U8 file and have a mac address registered as well to use on STB.This is really important to me because often I am at my girlfriend's place and the ability to login to another device is a great thing.

I can't comment on the VOD much because I haven't used it much but from what I have seen, it is behind the competition and they do need to up their VOD game.

The biggest complain I have is that for some reason using it on Kodi loads the VOD too on the PVR client and the only way to avoid that is to have them remove the VOD content altogether . I wish they could work something out about this because Vaderstreams has VOD too but won't populate the PVR client .

Overall, I am happy with the service. I plan on sticking with them. The price is unbeatable and for the price the small issues I have is acceptable.

Hi everyone this is my first review. After seeing all the positive feedback on Epoch I decided to try it out by buying the monthly package with all channels plus sports. I've only had it for a day but here is my impression.

I'm on a MiBox using Kodi. Setup was simple and easy. I had made a mostake entering in info and emailed their support. I had an email within minutes and they helped me figure out what I had done wrong.

On that note, the customer service including the facebook group has been nothing short of excellent thus far.

Not much else to say. I love the channel lineup, the price and the customer service. 10/10 rating on my first ever IPTV experience. I'm a noob but they made it easy amd affordable.

Reviewing as one of many users affected by the recent issues with express, I was looking for a solid provider about a week or 2 before it went down and got a 24hr trial of Epic. It was all I needed. I highly recommend checking this service out. I find the quality to be as good or better than express on some channels. Stability has been top notch. The EPG has been pretty good, although sometimes can be slow to populate and sometimes won't until you highlight the channel. I have read this could possibly be a bug with the T1. Epic has a few channels express didn't have which is great! although I do miss the timeshift ability on most all channels using express, but it is nice to see Epic adding more enabled channels. Service is again, top notch definitely with speed in mind. u/fr0-z3n is who you need to contact for this awesome value-for-your-money service.

If you need a reliable IPTV, stay away from NFPS/Rocket/IKS66 and Co. It is cheap, but you get what you pay for!! They have many channels, but always have many down or not watchable. You never know when and what can you watch.

Maintenance takes 1 week and you can watch blank screen during this period. Announcement says only 36 hrs. Apparently during every maintenance this is the case. Resellers are screwed during this period, because their customers will complain, rightfully.

Support is really non-existent! They refer you to a forum, where a few impatient, arrogant, thin skinned amateurish fellow give half answers here and there, when they feel like. If you ask too many questions they ban you apparently or close your threads. If you point out flaws in their service or ask for any improvements,they label you a spy/mole from another provider. They are willing to argue with customers publicly to have the last word. Bit of paranoia and insecurity combined. It shows lack of manners, education and real understanding of what customer service and support is about.

Frankly speaking, you can only compliment about their service on their forums, otherwise you are labelled sarcastic trouble maker. If you have cable, satellite and ANOTHER RELIABLE IPTV provider, with REAL services and support, then IPTV66 could be back up at 4th place. But with their unreliability, flaws and extremely poor customer service attitude, why would anyone choose to get aggravated for a few bucks?

Hello. This is my small review about Fab IPTV. So, I bought Fab IPTV for a month, on their website of course. I have bought the sports package, and so far I am really satisfied with my purchase. In the first place, the price is really awesome. I can't describe how cheap and awesome this service is. The IPTV service has a fair amount of sport channels. If you like sports, you should find the channel you need. I am going to use it to stream soccer matches and cast over to the TV with my chromecast.

hey guys.. just a shoutout for people looking for trying new service.. AVOID vcarib.. i think 1 guy runs the whole company and is VERYYYY RUDE.. idk how he got my email ID and kept on emailing me with new updates... anywho i replied to one today which was avoid iptv express.. i was abit angry why would you degrade another provider for your own benefit.. and also i asked him if he has support for iOS app.. for that he stated swearing like someone who is in a fist fight.. i told him this is going on reddit for which he further swear....

i did some background check.. this guy is using voodoo service or maybe ipguys as someone stated before.. but its not his service so why bother.. get your self directly from real provider and get good customer service..

they go by the name Vcarib/Invoke/Deploy

Heya, this is my 2nd IPTV sub after RocketIP (or something like that). Waited a month to make this so I got a full impression.

Pros:

• Channel quality is great
• Channel options from EU perspective is excellent. All UK and most major FR channels is great. There is now UK based server I believe (which I will discuss below)
• Support is fantastic. Get an answer and a resolution normally within an hour or so.

Cons:

• EPG. It's terrible. When it works, less than half the 600 channels has it. Most of UK channels does not have it. In the month I had the sub, EPG was down 3 times (its down the 3rd time as I speak right now).
• First 2 weeks of my sub, channel service was sub par. A LOT of channels down/rebuff. Was quickly sorted, and my last 2 weeks have been mostly perfect (only the odd buffer). Running on a dedicated 360meg line and can stream off other sites (including official ones) without issue so I cannot fault my ISP.

Overall, I understand Epicstreams is moving in the right direction. I'll be going another month with these guys and making an ultimate decision then. If my last 2 weeks to go by I'd give them a solid 8.5/10. But reviewing the month as a whole and the lack of EU EPG, I'll give them 7.5/10.

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Hey everyone. I have never done a review on Reddit, but I wanted to give major props to my first ever IPTV provider, EpochIPTV. They are new and I wanted to share the love. The best way I can do this is by mentioning the pros and cons I have noticed throughout my trial and few days of service thus far.

Pros:

1. TOP customer service. I'm serious. Lightning fast "want to help you" service. That is both through their website and Facebook page. Despite living on the other side of the world from me, they are staying up late at night to make sure that the latest MLB game is working properly -- which just happens to be my TX Rangers. I really appreciate this.

2. I am using this service via Kodi on both my laptop and iPhone. Yes, you can use the service through as many different types of connections as you want, just one at a time. Totally awesome!

3. I did the full 24 hr free trial, and I just subscribed to the 12 months Live Sports Package, as I already have Kodi and don't really need the tv/movie part. But for those of you who have to watch Walking Dead live, I will say that I haven't had any stuttering so far. Zero. I'm not saying that it won't down the road, but that's a great start. There are also several on demand movies. There have been several big hits added in the last couple of days.

4. Sports Packages range from $7.50/month to $46/year. And I tried and tried to use free services like Sportsdevil and Pro Sports, but they are either dead now or hanging on by a thin thread. Baseball is the most important thing for me right now and these prices are unbelievable!

5. Everything I have seen has been 720p or 1080p. No more squinting to figure out what I am looking at.

6. Tons of variety of channels. *If I am allowed to post links to the channel list and prices, please let me know.

7. I've only had one tiny issue with the channel guide on Kodi (see cons), but I like the organization and ease of the guide.

Cons:

1. They are working hard to make sure all of the MLB games play each day. The last couple of days, the two latest games haven't played. But I really appreciate the diligence they are taking to make sure this issue is alleviated very soon... I will note that all of the other sports I have watched, have all games working: NBA and NHL. I haven't tried to watch any international sports and it's not NFL season right now.

2. It was a little confusing at first to see how to install the Kodi app, but I was quickly helped in the Facebook group and pointed in the right direction.

3. One time on the program list during my trial, it was auto scrolling and playing a new show every few seconds. But that hasn't happened since.

4. As of now, the MLB games don't say which game is on which channel, but it will say if they channel has a game on or not. Maybe this will change in the future? It's not really a big deal, as I can click and look. There is only about a 1/2 second pause when changing channels.

Overall, I am VERY pleased with my service thus far and look forward to the rest of the MLB season and the NFL season in the Fall!

Feel free to ask any questions you have. I'm still learning the iptv lingo, but I'll do my best.

Had a trial yesterday and was happy enough to get the combined package within an hour.

Tested the normal channels such as BBC, flawless.

Tested catch up and thought it was a great feature, no issues at all and a good addition to normal services.

Tested movie channels, fine overall but one period of buffering, which I think may have been a hardware issue.

Sports, worked flawless at first but sadly I did have a few moments of buffering or freezing, which would fix itself eventually or I would have to close and open again so not a huge deal. I had to load the SD stream of boxing last night when HD buffered a few times, didn't seem like to much of an issue though but I was busy watching it so switched to SD, so it's nice to know there's an alternative if HD cocks up. I never expect 100 percent when it comes to sports so I'm fine with that, and SD did seem more reliable but overall it was 99% fine even with the premier league. Will test again with the footy later.

On demand worked fine, watched a few hours last night and didn't have one issue, obviously being in its infancy content is a bit of an issue but that's something that will be added further down the line.

Generally impressed with it and worth the price, good professional customer service and speedy responses. Only issues were a few bits of buffering on sports and lack of on demand content (not really an issue there's a million places to get movies from but the speediness and reliability of Fab is impressive)

A solid 8.5/10, if it's flawless today with the football then it's a 9/10.

As a disclaimer, I've been using Fab for about two months now. I started off on the Flawless service and then moved up to the in-house service after I heard about FHD sports channels, more on that later.

First, the pros

• Customer service is second to none. I don't think I've ever experienced such good customer service anywhere. The Facebook group and ticket system is great, the admins get back to me within minutes with support. If you have a problem, they'll help you out, no doubt.

• VOD. The admins have been adding movies and TV shows by the buckets these past few weeks, taking requests too! Admittedly I don't use it much apart from shows I binge over and over, but its always worked well and thanks to the great customer service, you could ask them to add something you like!

• Overall quality The quality for the most part is great. I'm very fussy, incredibly fussy but overall I'm satisfied. Most channels, UK at least, are stable at 720p streams with a decent bitrate to boot. Don't expect cable quality from IPTV, but its good enough for regular TV watching.

• EPG Updated fast and vast. A great addition to IPTV, something I can't live without now that I have it.

The cons

• Reliability I've been a bit disappointed. For example, whenever the football (soccer) is on, Sky Sports will buffer a lot. I'm on 100mbps down so I don't think that's the problem. I'd say it buffers once every two minutes for a few seconds, practically unwatchable, to me, unfortunately. If Fab could improve their servers and handle the loads better, this service would be almost perfect. I'll continue to test things during big events and report back.

• General things As typical with services such as IPTV, promises are often unkept and things just drag on. For example, Fab advertise that they have FHD channels for BT Sport, however right now 1 is 1080p, while the rest are 720p. It's not a dealbreaker by any means, I'd just prefer if they were straight up with customers.

As a general comment, bitrate matters. I've streamed things myself and don't count myself as an expert but, you need find a balance between resolution and bitrate within the limits of your network and hardware. Streams might be 1080p but it means nothing if there's tons of artifacting all over the place when the picture gets complicated, so to speak. We, as customers, should focus on bitrate more than resolution most of the time. I put this here because its a general IPTV issue, not related to the service in question.

It appears that customers have a bit too much power in the /r/IPTVReviews. Resellers have to do a lot of work to counter a bad customer reviews. Beginning now each re-seller will be allowed one post in /r/IPTVreviews

• One post per reseller
• Spamming links will still be removed
• If you post more than one post, only your newest post will be kept. Your old post deleted along with the comments.

That's it. Happy streaming!

[deleted]

Hey guys just wanted to take a minute to leave a review on Epicstream. Since I found out about the service thanks to IPTVreview I feel I should leave a review here as well.

I have been with them for about two weeks now, I was initially looking for US channels (CNN, Animal Planet, Discovery, Nick, Nick Toons, and more). My current setup is STBEMU Pro on a Fire Stick.

The signup process was very easy and quick. There was a small wait of roughly 2 hours before I had access from the time I submitted payment.

The performance and quality of the streams are excellent. I have tried many other providers and I will say that this tops them all. Picture quality is great, and minus a few hiccups here and there is very reliable.

The channel selection is very good, and has almost anything you would need. I will say it does not have as many channels as some providers, but most of the channels missing are very obscure and in full disclosure never watched by myself. The EPG is great and actually shows 90% of the guide which is impressive compared to some providers.

For what the service costs it is an extremely fair value, in fact I would like to say the best value for quality that I have experienced yet in trying multiple providers.

The shining gem of the service is the support. I have asked a few questions or had a few issues and have posted it to Facebook with an almost immediate response, and when capable and almost immediate fix. The thing that really makes the service shine is you don't get an angry response or a brush off like you do with some providers. The support page is great and it is not uncommon to have some humor tossed around.

I would rate the service an 8 / 10. The only downsides that I have are the EPG could be broken down into more categories. Right now it is mainly split by UK, English, Movies, Sports, Arabic, French, Indian, and a few others. I would like to see it broken down more so, as an example, it would be easy to just select US News channels, or US Movie channels.