Here is a quick comparision of what people calls the (official paid) IPTV Stalker vs. European IPTV Providers.
Please note that when I say European IPTV providers I'm not talking about IPTV Stalker resellers such as ProStreams.
I'm talking about providers that have their servers in europe so they offer mainly european content such as alphacs, planet cs or rapidiptv among others
Where does the official IPTV Stalker excels?
+They have the most important channels from USA and UK.
+Channels load very very fast.
+As a consequence of what I just mentioned, when I switch between channels the change is done almost instantly.
+Good EPG guide (some european iptv services don't have their own EPG system so you have to create one yourself or rely on their ugly addons).
Where does the official IPTV Stalker fails?
-They don't have any important channel from other european countries (with the exception of UK, as I mentioned above)
-Bad image quality:
There is not one single channel with more than 480p and I would say that there way too many channels that look like more 360p than 480p.
I know the european providers don't provide HD channels really even if they claim to do that. But at least most of them are 480p and some are a sort of enhanced 480p channels (what they call HD)
Many channels have are 4:3 with bad stripeds on the sides! That remembers me to my old tv box.
-Lack of support for m3u playlists (VLC). If I'm not wrong you can just use it with an STB Emulator, Kodi or a MAG box.
-Its' not user friendly if you want to stop watching it in one device and continue watching in a different device: you need to open a website, change the mac address, change it in the device settings...
Summary:
I live in Europe, so I think I made the right decission donating one month only for the official iptv stalker instead of 1 year.
I don't really mind the lack of EU channels as long as they have UK Sky Sports and BT Sports... However the image quality is considerable worst than the european iptv service that I'm currently using (which costs around 5 euros more per month and doesn't have PVR IPTV SImple integration but at least has more than 20 important channels with a quality slightly better than 480p)
My advice:
Unless you are a geek that want to try every new thing even if you don't need it (I'm one of those), I would stick to p2p streams (acestream and sopcast): the quality of the image is better and it's free.
If for some reason you want to try a paid iptv service so you can judge yourself I think my vote is clear....
It's a shame that the "IPTV Stalker" image quality is so bad compared with the one of European providers, because the channels load instantly and the epg guide is really nice.