Thursday 15 September 2016

Review of Stealth Streams IPTV Service

StealthStreams came recommended to me from somewhere (Wish I could remember where), and they have a free trial (24 hours).  Messages were responded to very quickly and politely via Facebook, which makes it easy to get up and running quickly.

The Kodi addon is easy to download; Stealth Streams operate their own repository, which means the addon should stay updated.

Flicking through channels quickly gives a great impression, not only are the channel changes extremely fast, but the picture is of a high standard, in some cases 1080p resolution.

A really nice (and uncommon) feature offered by Stealth Streams is the iVue TV Guide integration.  Full EPG TV guides offer a far more pleasant way to browse through channels.  This was very simply achieved with two stages:
  1. Download and install the iVue addon (a login is required for this from their Facebook page)
  2. Run the iVue wizard from within the StealthStreams addon

Overall StealthSteams offers a very good package for the money with a solid support offered via Facebook chat.  The iVue functionality is the icing on the cake and is a premium IPTV service well worth checking out.

My Ultimate IPTV solution

I've been having a think about what my favourite setup would look like for a premium IPTV provider.

It'd consist of:

Kodi as the front end. 

I love Kodi and use it daily to view TV Shows, Movies, Radio, Live TV and Pictures.

Kodi's native Live TV Interface.  

Although I'm new to iVue and I really like it so far, i'm used to the native Live TV EPG and it's controls.  It's got it's flaws but it's one of the things that's being worked on by the Kodi developers.

Utopia would be being able to customise which type of tuner (IP or DVB) has priority, e.g. I could set BBC HD through my DVB tuner as priority over the IP equivalent, as it's likely I'd get a higher bitrate through the DVB-T2 tuner than the IPTV service.

Timeshift and PVR functionality.  

I currently use TVheadend for my terrestrial channels and one of the things I've never quite sussed out is the Timeshift functionality, but as a PVR it is rock solid.

If anyone's got any thoughts or suggestions to achieve the dream scenario, please do comment or get me on Twitter @pww_tech !