re: Anyone with ESPN plus experience

I bookmarked the longest post I've ever made, for reasons just like this. It's long as hell, but covered everything...

This post accidently turned into a novel. But it covers pretty much everything you could want to know about IPTVs and streaming options. But I've seen this question come up every football season for years, and you probably won't need to ask any follow up questions after reading it. If you want, I'll let you where to send any "thank you" bjs or Bama tickets.

I'm 40, and have pirating in almost every way you can imagine for about 25 years. I sold pirate CDs in high school before Napster existed. So, I've been around, and here's how it works.

Yes, iptvs can be a awesome to use. But they're illegal as hell, and that's on both ends. What it is doing is providing a live feed of an active, live network. That's different than streaming movies or TV shows that were pre-recorded. That was just illegal for the person providing the stream (though that loophole might have changed.) If you were going to use an IPTV, you'll want a VPN. But those are cheap, usually three to five dollars a month.

So while they can be awesome to use, they can also be sketchy as hell. For example, the specific IPTV that poster mentioned, I looked into it. It is a good one, but has been a referral only system for a few years. A bunch of big IPTVs have gotten busted over the years. So they lock it down for security.

And with that service if you don't pay for a month you lose access. Because it is a good one they limit the number of users, otherwise it would buffer and lag during peak hours or big sport events. So if you miss a payment, someone else takes your spot, and you go to the back of the line. Popular sites can take month to regain access.

When you try to Google it, six or eight different websites with the same name pull up. Almost all of those are either scams or a shitty service trying to use their name. Avoid those like the plague.

You also want to try to protect yourself by not using your credit cards. Some will use PayPal, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is not a scam. Usually some kind of crypto like Bitcoin, or even Visa gift cards or the way to go. If it did get busted, i sure as hell wouldn't want my PayPal or credit card attached to their accounts. Like Wu-Tang said, best protect ya neck.

And some of those random IPTVs, especially ones advertised in Reddit posts, just decide to take the money and run. Whether it's a scam or they get busted, it's always been recommended it's only by a month or two at a time. I've heard a ton of stories of people buying a year subscription, just have the service disappear 6 weeks later.

And while they offer thousands of channels from all over the world, that doesn't mean the more the merrier. If they are offering 10,000 channels, most will not be actively moderated. It's just a bunch of shitty laggy channels, if they even work at all. It's usually recommended to find a service with a couple thousand channels instead of 20,000. They usually try to find one that's geared towards USA TV, UK TV, or whichever country you're region somebody wants to watch. There are very popular in Europe for people that want to watch American networks. That, and immigrants that want to watch network from their home countries. On one that I had, I pulled up TV networks from all over the world. It can be pretty fun to play with. I have YouTube TV, but I still wouldn't mind one just to have fun and play around on. But I can't find one that I trust, so frick it.


I spent a couple hours looking into it again, because I enjoyed watching Bama games on networks from Minnesota or Maine. It made for some funny commercials compared to the sweltering Gulf Coast. But for my needs, being able to already watch 95% of all games broadcasted, it's just unnecessary.

And to be honest, most of y'all do not have a good enough streaming device to use it full-time for iptvs. They will work, but they just lag way too much for my liking. I like to use and Nvidia shield. They work amazingly will. The best 2 streaming devices made are the Nvidia shield from 2019, then the shield from 2015/16. 3rd place is still behind a 7-8 year old device (the one which I'm using). That's how good the run. If your firestick is 3 years old, you might not like how it runs.

You want any sporting event for free? Without having to register an account and it's free? Download Kodi.

Kodi is just a media player. You can download it on your device's app store for free. It runs on any operating system (maybe not Roku, check your app store). PC, Android, iOS, Linux, etc. From there you just need to set it up. You set it up by installing "add-ons" and there are add-ons for pretty much anything you want.

Do you guys remember those sketchy as hell Russian stream sites? The ones with a million porn pop ups, fake video players, and malware just waiting to infect your computer? Yes, they worked. But it was like walking through a minefield. If somebody was dumb enough to install something, you might as well have thrown that device in the garbage.

What Kodi does is it goes to those websites for you, the add-ons have the feeds and link addresses, then Kodi grabs those links for you, so you don't have to risk destroying your device to watch a Bama game. It has no ads. It just grabs the feed that you want, from wherever you tell it to go.

The add-ons are basically programs guys have written that have all the links and feeds. It takes a little bit of experimenting experimenting to learn how to navigate the menus and to pull up different feeds. It's harder than apps like YouTube TV or the ESPN app, but it's not that hard.

Here are some very clear and concise setup guides to install add-ons:

The Loop

troypoint.com/the-loop-

The Crew

troypoint.com/crew-kodi-addon/

So far, I've been able to pull up games like Howard vs Eastern Michigan in HD, and the feeds I've watched from the PAC-2 network were way higher quality than this Tennessee game I'm watching on ABC on YouTubeTV.

So if you only give a shite about sports, this is your best bet, imo. That, or good luck trying to get on a good IPTV service.