With all the recent concern with services getting shut down and sued, and most services using the unsafe practice of taking Paypal for payment, which stores your info and opens you up to all kinds of trouble should your seller get taken down...I went on a mission looking for a service that puts security and anonymity at the forefront, while at the same time providing a great service.
Obviously this was not an easy endeavor because most providers buy domain privacy, throw up a website, take Paypal and think they're protected. After a long search...I think I finally found one I feel completely safe using.
So to start, a disclaimer. I have no affiliation with this service other than that I use it as a customer. I'm not a reseller, I'm not a provider, I'm just a paranoid customer who wants a little peace of mind when I send a service like this a payment. I feel like there's probably a lot of you that are the same way, or should be more concerned about it in any event.
The service I came across is called Team Orion . Before I tell you about their service, let me tell you about their security. So when I found the site I immediately did a WHOIS search on the domain name. It's hosted by a company out of Iceland by a group of privacy advocates. They take Bitcoin payments with no information given. This means the seller is 100% anonymous. I later asked the seller for all the precautions they took setting up, and I was told they anonymously registered the domain name with Bitcoin through a third party that specializes in anonymous domain names, uses encrypted emails through a well known private email server, and only takes Bitcoin on a platform they signed up for anonymously, and they transfer that Bitcoin to a hardware wallet. The result, pure anonymity for the seller and for the customer.
Having said that, that means you do need to pay with cryptocurrency. Currently they take Bitcoin, USDX, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Etherium, and is looking to add more in the future. Bitcoin is not hard to use, you just open a wallet with Coinbase or Blockchain or whatever else you want, and buy bitcoins with your credit card or whatever means the wallet provides. Then you go to the checkout screen, scan the QR code and you're done. As soon as the confirmations go through, your account info is sent. It's worth learning, aside from this service.
Anyway onto the service review. I've spent the last 2 months testing this.
So there are two different servers Team Orion offers. One is a North American server, and one is a European server. I did test both, but I did not spend much time at all on the European server as I am based in North America. However in the week or so that I did use it, it was quite good...zap times on channels were a bit slow but that might be because I'm so far from the server. UK sports coverage is very good on it though.
The North American server...I was expecting the performance of the service to be lower quality for some reason, but I connected to this and was thoroughly impressed. The sports and events on this thing are outrageous. There are PPV events every weekend that I've never even heard of and they're all on there without fail. For combat sports fans, I dare you to try to find an event not covered on this. It even has live Japanese wrestling, haha. Sports are glorious 60fps, and you can get up to 5 connections so multiscreen is a dream on it on Sundays.
The US section is also very strong. High def channels, quick load times, good EPG, and just really stable in general. The Canada section is ok, it has all the main stuff there but there are a few SD feeds. As Canadian feeds go though, quite good compared to many others. The international section I spend almost no time on but seems to just be there for the sake of being there. I wouldn't buy it based on that, it's up and down a lot and a lot of the time I scroll through them and they just flat out don't work. The UK section is good, I don't think I'd trust it for soccer on Saturdays but I suppose that's what the other UK server is for. For the every day basic UK channels it's pretty well covered though.
Another thing for sports, in the sports sections (ie NFL, MLB, etc) the channel names are the games that day (ie Patriots vs Steelers) so you're not scrolling through a bunch of "NFL Gamepass 01" with no EPG info and you're blindly looking for the game you want. That's an important detail for me.
Now like any service there are moments where they do a server reboot, or something goes bad and it takes a few minutes longer than expected to come back up, but that has only happened once and it was about 20 minutes in the time I've used it, during off peak hours so it seemed like scheduled maintenance that hit a snag maybe. I opened a ticket during this period to see what the response time would be like from support. They were probably pretty slammed with tickets but I got a response within 10 minutes and shortly after a "we are conducting maintenance, please don't submit a ticket" was put up in the client area so I know they were working on it.
There is very, very limited VOD on the North American server but they also sell a separate VOD service for I think $7 that is really deep and has 4K content. I bought a month and used it a few times but I let it lapse since I just didn't watch it enough. Seemed solid while I had it.
So, with the security measures in place, a really good solid service, and the amount of content on here...I was expecting a pretty high price. Well...starts at $11 for a month, and you can add up to 5 connections. Can't go wrong with that.
Overall, giving this a solid 4.5/5 stars based on what I use it for. You may have a difference experience, I don't know. But for $11 and knowing my info is safe...I'm gonna stick with them for a while.
This sounds great but I honestly tried to buy bitcoin before and utterly failed. Would love to try these as the sports and PPV are pretty much all I would use it for. I even failed at making a fake paypal. I'm not the best of cybercriminals.