I tried searching on reddit and holy **** it is a topic that is 100% dominated by spammers selling their own personal service.
If you click on anybody’s profile you can see they exist solely to recommend one particular iptv service. I can’t see any human recommendation!
If you mean a service like SlingTV, it's totally pointless and a waste of money unless you're setting up TV for an old person who has been watching traditional broadcast TV with a remote control for 50+ years and cognitively can't adapt to watching any other way.
Exactly this 😂
SlingTV on a Roku device is basically the same thing as the DirecTV or Dish they've been watching and half the price.
there is so little that is worth watching I just torrent stuff as needed
plex organizes everything, I don't even have to rename files, just dump them in a directory that says "movies" or "tv"
I still try to keep series in separate seasons just to i can quickly tell if im missing something but otherwise it is pretty painless after the initial setup
How hard is it to set up? I have been thinking about centralising my movie collection. Can you do that with a Raspberry Pi?
You can, but playback might stutter. I use Kodi with older 4th generation Intel CPUs (4570s) for my media PCs. I use midsize towers for parts compatibility, but you could use little mini-PC options.
plex.tv is easy to install, downloading content requires a torrent client and a vpn if your isp is bitchy or you live in a crappy country
once you have your media on a plex server it is straightforward to stream from any smart tv or desktop or mobile device, the mobile plex app costs $5
for dumb tvs you can use a roku or (I think) a fire stick
I don't have automation downloading shows for me, I just manually copy magnet links from piratebay into my torrent client, then copy the shows into the folders my plex scans after they are done
it has never gotten to the point where the 3-5 minutes it takes me to go through my process a few times a week was worth the time to figure out how to get the automation working and debug the inevitable problems
If you're looking to go sailing, check out that type of add-ons for Kodi. They are a bit cumbersome to use, but you can find almost anything.
If you're looking at paid services, I've had my hands in most of the legal paid "TV-channel" based services for American TV at some point. I'd probably recommend SlingTV the most, but that's because it's cheap. It's going to very much depend on what you're trying to get as to what is best for you.
If you're looking for other "IPTV" services for American channels outside the known legal ones, well those are illegal distributors and might as well just go sailing in your own boat for free at that point.