IPTV:The Good the Bad and the Free
THE JOURNEY
About a year ago I set out on a journey to cut the cable and find the best IPTV solution that would work for me. I knew I was tired of paying $150 a month for only a couple of channels that I watched on a regular basis. I also knew that I was not completely willing to give up those channels however few they were because it’s part of my relaxation time. I started by asking friends and family about their personal experiences with IPTV and found that at least amongst the people I had in my circle there was not a lot of knowledge surrounding this question. My brother seem to have the most knowledge on the subject and had already downloaded some IP TV applications for his firestick. He started sending me screenshots I’ve going through the process of unlocking my firestick which was relatively straightforward. Then he helped me with the process of installing downloader and a few various other applications that I would need in order to install an IPTV application. This is where most of the issues started.
THE FREE
I will go in reverse order. First we will cover free… Let me just say first of all that with like almost anything else you get what you pay for. I downloaded multiple free IPTV and video on demand services and found a few things to be common. First some of them are confusing to install And continually change codes so you’re constantly having to go back to the makers website and get the new code to activate your application. Secondly very few of them work at all and those that do work are very slow, glitchy and change menus so often that you can never rely on being able to go watch the channels that you signed up for in the first place.
THE BAD
Next we come to the BAD… just take a journey through a Google search and look for affordable or cheap IPTV applications. No doubt a multitude of websites will pop up and you can begin to go through each of them to find out what it is that they offer. Some of them will just say “thousands of channels“ but don’t really give you any idea of what any of those channels are specifically. These “cheap“ IPTV applications can range anywhere from $10 a month to 30 or even $40 a month. With this scenario I will tell you that you sometimes get what you pay for. I tried applications anywhere from $10 a month up to my limit which for me was about $20 a month. For $20 a month I actually got a relatively decent service however the accounting side of that service was a bit of a nightmare. For that particular service which will remain unnamed I found that if the credit card I had associated with that particular account changed because of being lost or stolen the website would not allow me to update my payment method is simply cancel the service altogether. At that point I would have to go back through completely re-register and type in the 49 digit long access codes required to activate the service. This was extremely frustrating to me. For $10 a month I signed up for another unnamed service that boosted thousands of channels and thousands of movies on demand. I decided to give it a shot so I signed up for a single month. During that month the service was fantastic the movies streamed although they were a little slow to load and all of the TV channels were there just like promised. At the end of that month I was satisfied enough to sign up for their three month package. And I’m telling you that I could not make this up if I tried. The very moment that I purchased the three months of service and log back in to the application I found that the video on demand service was no longer there. I went to the customer support telegram chat and begin to ask what happened to the video on demand service. The chat seem to be filled with a number of representatives of that particular company posing as customers. All of them said that they were not the admin but they all had answers and defenses for why the company did what it did and told me that this was no big deal and I was still getting a good deal even though the video on the main service was now gone. Then they told me I would have known that this service was ending if I had simply kept up with the blog on their website. At that point I was getting a little bit frustrated and try to make them understand that I do not have time in my busy day to go check the website blog to determine whether or not they were going to add or remove the service. When the “admin“ did finally show up in the chat they repeated the words of the other “members“ and after questioning them further I was immediately blocked from the chat. These are the types of things that apparently have come to be known as “normal“. I just don’t think that is acceptable. So I decided to go for “the good“ and ended up with the excellent.
THE GOOD
After a year of disappointment my brother and I decided to go directly to the root of the problem and start building a service that not only meet your needs but also your expectations. We wanted to have the best IPTV service on the internet. We wanted to provide our customers with a fast streaming service for both live television channels and video on demand. We also included some nice little features like recording and favorites as well as a multitude of music channels. We wanted our videos to load quickly and the live TV channels to be consistent. And we wanted on top of all that to provide excellent customer service to all our customers. We don’t always get it right the first time but we will eventually make it right every time. Although we are still in a growth pattern and things do change now and then we promise to never make a fundamental change to your service without informing you our customer and giving you some options. We also decided it might be nice if our customers could get an idea about what they were getting before they actually had to buy it. We decided to offer a 24 hour free trial and to top it all off one of the cheapest IPTV services on the market today. Starting at just $7.99 per month!
John West
