For reliability, especially if your family are going to be such "dicks" tell them to start paying the bills. They need to start understanding the reality of the situation. But going with a legit provider and having a "backup" is a great idea.

What you need is a multiroom provider for one, and boxes with wifi so you can move them around the house if needed. Beelink mini m8s II, with xannytech firmware from freaktab, for one.

Reliability is always an issue, especially during large events and if your kids can't wrap their head around it, as I said, tell them start paying the PPV bill for it, and that should shut them the fuck up. Unless they have an extra 80 dollars every time they want to be disappointed by a UFC fight/boxing event. Yes I know I'm "nice".

As for EPG, there are plenty of free epg's you can download and put on your smart devices. All you need to know is the channel you're on. EPG data can be complicated to program in. It's not as simple as everyone here seems to think it is. If it was, every provider would have a perfect EPG, maybe 2-3 do, from every single review I've seen. Heck even Express' EPG is broken most of the damn time.

TLDR, get a multi room sub, get boxes with good wif, tell kids if they complain to PAY for PPV events themselves. I'm an asshole. Cheers.

I'm in the same situation as you. I've tried 4 different IPTV providers and only, Smoothstreams, has been consistent enough to keep. I use an 2nd Gen AFTV 4k box w/ 5G wifi.

I can take a little bit of buffering, but the wifey will not. She mostly watches HGTV, Food channels and they buffer a lot.

We went back to PS Vue, which we had for 6 months. I still use Smoothstreams for sports and PPV's.

/u/Blue-Thunder...that was your best rant yet! LMAO!!

I also have a family and they are a bit picky. Not terribly, as my 13 year old daughter doesn't watch alot of TV and my wife really only gets on my case when the EPG is messed up or the buffering is constant.

That said, my setup is that I have a minimal legit sub as a complete fallback with only really the network stations a couple of specialty channels they like. Costs me about $25/mth.

I have FabIPTV on their Entertainment package for about $8/mth CDN and Epicstreams for about $14/mth CDN.

Fab is our primary because it rarely buffers and has the best EPG of any provider I've used...except for about 4 hours in the evening when my Dreamlink decides to stop downloading it unless I download each individual channel. That's where Epic comes in. Excellent quality, rarely buffers, but their EPG isn't quite as complete. Still pretty good though.

So, for under $50/mth, I have 100% uptime (because the legit sub never goes down and 98% of the time either Epic or Fab is up), I get every sporting event, PPV event and movie channel I can imagine and because I have two separate subs plus a legit sub, I can watch something in any room in my house.

It took me over two months of testing to get to this point but I'm about as happy with my setup as I think I can possibly be considering I was paying over $120/mth for far less content just 3 months ago.

Not all TVs are on at the same time usually around three, but the hassle of changing Mac addresses or entering login details on different devices all the time gets to be a pain.

Wait what? Why would you need to enter login details all the time?

They are a Canadian feed vs US feed.

Vader has US feed on most channels.

The other issue I have is having to buy multiple subscriptions for each TV in our house which we have five.

Vader has 3 streams at once .

But from what you are saying, Less than legal IPTV is not for you.

I'd be interested in knowing what servers you've tried. There are some providers that actually restream Playstation service and the savings cam be drastic.

If you're having issues with all services you've tried, you may not have tried some of the key players. There are a few out there that are pretty Damn reliable with Next to no buffering.

The epg stuff is a whole different beast. What did you guys do back in the day of analog cable? Wow!

Vue sounds like the best bet for the family. Definitely was the best overall in terms of stability between the big 3 (Vue/Sling/Directv) back when i was messing with them, which takes it to a level you simply won't find with IPTV.

For yourself, and maybe also as an available outlet to slowly ease them into IPTV acceptance, I'd recommend you supplement with Vader. Which offers a better and/or more casual friendly experience then Smoothstreams on pretty much every level in my own experience, especially if buffering/drops is going to be an absolute turn off factor (aka: Smoothstreams does a better job keeping their service up, but Vader's servers seem to be more stable when they both are).