I'm brand new to IPTV, but as a Brit living in the US I wanted to find a way to watch HD British TV and lots and lots of football. HBO and PPV events would be nice too!
I cut the cable cord about 3 years ago so I mostly use Apple TV and thanks to my wife's granny and her cable subscription I have access to NBC Sports for the premier league matches. I subscribed to fubo.tv for la liga and the champions league, but unfortunately granny doesn't have Fox Sports as part of her package so I was SOL for the Europa League. I also use a HDHomerun and a digital antenna to get the HD local channels.
I use a smartdns service and a UK apple ID to load BBC iPlayer which is great quality and TVPlayer for a bunch of the SD OTA channels.
So I bought a MAG 254 box. Initially I thought about just side loading Kodi on to the Apple tv (one box to rule them all!), so I did that, but I wasn't a great fan of the experience.
My first foray into paid IPTV was using a free 24 hour trial at iptvsubs.is. The channel line up looked great and for the first 20 minutes everything was perfect. The price is reasonable ($132 for one year). Then everything started to slow down. Channels were buffering, cutting out or simply not loading. I went to their website and looked at their forum and realized I was not the only one and maybe they need to buy additional hardware to keep up with demand.
Next I tried the free 24 hour pass from AlphaCS. ($135 for a year). Great quality HD/SD channels, very Eurocentric, but no HBO (in English).
Third choice was iks66.(NFPS) They didn't have a 24 hour trial, so I paid for a month ($9). They were the most difficult to set up, and I was charged twice. They said the first credit card did not go through, so I used a different card. In actuality both went through and I am working now to get the extra charge refunded. At $80 per year they were the cheapest of the bunch and had a huge selection of global channels, especially South America. I did not experience any buffering, but every channel is SD and some were really poor quality.
I really liked the channel selection of IPTV Express. I saw the channel listing on a couple of different resellers websites, but it took some investigative work to find out who the actual provider was. They are very big on southwest Asian language channels but also have a great selection of English HD channels, both from the UK and US and a lot of HD sports channels including about 20 cricket channels! I found a price of $100 a year. The reseller did not offer a trial, so I paid for a month and although he had the slowest response time (24+ hours) the selection and price is exactly what I was looking for. They even had Liverpool FC channel, which was a big bonus! No buffering, very clear HD/4K channels. Assuming everything continues well, this is probably the service I will continue with.
As a side note I discounted ntv.mx because of cost (~$500 p/a for the channels I wanted) and ruyu (~$360 p/a).
I'd like to thank everyone in the sub for some great recommendations and especially the list of preferred vendors. If I can answer any questions for anyone hesitant to take the plunge, let me know!
**Edit to add - forgot about Rapid IPTV. Requested a free trial, as listed on their website, and a week later I'm still waiting....