Hi, what do you think about collecting some money to build up a honest and transparent IPTV review website?
If every user would donate just a couple of $ we could come up with a great website which would help a lot of other people by doing a long term review (1 month of testing) giving detailed answers.
I am in with the first $10 :-)
Someone has a google drive excel doc that has it. It has been posted here before and its pretty good.
i had this exact idea 2 weeks back, when i saw the spreadsheet post.
i've been a member of starstreams/smoothstreams for years and always had problems with them for certain events. never a problem for UFC, sometimes problems for NFL but ALWAYS buffering for English premier league.
so my idea was run ffmpeg on my Irish server (where I'm located) and test for buffering. i think this can be tested through ffmpeg. i'll do some testing and get back to ya
How much do you need to raise?
There's really no need. We all know what's best right now (SmoothStreams, Torula, & Ruya). I came to this conclusion after trying several more. What's best for you will probably depend on your location and needs.
Each has it's strengths and weaknesses.
SmoothStreams is obviously primarily limited to sports broadcasts without 24/7 streams of anything. However, a fair compromise, you get every game and when it's a slow sports day you get the channels like NFL, NBA, MLB, etc and even HBO and the like. It's also been rock solid from a reliability stand point. Sure, you get the occasional buffer but it never seems to be bad and it's never down completely. A mix of 540, some 720 for big events, and the very occasional 1080 streams. If you have a family, however, nothing here for the kids and wife.
Ruya gets you a ton of channels and many in languages. If I was in Europe I'd hop on this bandwagon pretty quick. Very good quality streams (a lot of 720p, some 540 and 480) and seems stable. However, I was having issues with US sports (particularly NFL) which is kind of a big deal for me. What's worse: their support was limited to a Facebook page (which I don't have or want) and because my issues were occurring in the US afternoon/evening their support wasn't around.
Torula is a great compromise. Some issues with streams going down but I can't complain from a value standpoint because 95% of the time its smooth as butter. 540p 24/7 streams of every channel I would want with timely support if things start acting up. They have a nice working EPG in kodi which makes the interface very nice.
Like others have said it's hard to rely on any one service. Best thing to do is hedge your bets by not going too far out with your sub or sub to more than one to mitigate issues/downtime. If you're unwilling to do that despite the value these services provide, you really need to consider official services like Sling and Vue.
No a bad idea but I doubt you'll get any takers. Plus, a service can be great one month and then under DDOS the next 2 weeks. I guess it would depend on how well the service responds and their contingency planning but it's kind of unpredictable. One month a service can be great, the next not so much.