Because the ranking is the product. Pages that put providers in order are usually monetized by placement, and buyers have worked that out: the recurring complaint in discussion threads is that the ordering tracks commission rather than testing. The tell is visible without knowing anything about the market. The same handful of names appear in different orders, adjectives stand in for figures, and no page explains the method that produced the order. We are not going to pose as a neutral referee scoring the field, because we sell one of the services. What we can hand you is a set of checks that work on any service, including this one, and the numbers to run them against.

Six items, all answerable before money moves, all checkable afterwards. Anyone who declines to answer in writing has told you something useful. Write the answers down at checkout, because the point of asking is being able to hold the service to them in month seven, not month one. Our answers: 99.99% uptime, about 53 minutes a year; 1 to 5 simultaneous connections with unlimited installs; roughly five minutes to activation; a 7-day money-back window on plans, with the $5 trial excluded; no card kept on file and nothing that renews by itself; 54,000+ live channels and 219,577+ VOD titles across 190+ countries.

1. 1Is there a published uptime figure, and what does it convert to in minutes per year?
2. 2How many streams run at once, and how many installs does one account allow?
3. 3How long from payment to working credentials?
4. 4What is the refund window, in writing, and what is excluded from it?
5. 5Is a card stored, and does anything renew without you acting?
6. 6What is the smallest paid test the service will sell you?

Three come up again and again from people who lost money. Crypto-only checkout, because those transfers cannot be reversed and you keep the entire exposure. Refunds offered as store credit or gift cards, which converts your money into something spendable only with the seller who already disappointed you. And refusal to sell any short test at all, which is the clearest sign that a service does not expect to survive an honest first day. Add a fourth for 2026: single-payment permanent-access offers priced at twenty or thirty dollars. A service that quotes you a decade of television for the price of a takeout meal has not solved bandwidth economics, it has just moved the loss onto you.

Test at the worst moment, not the easiest. Pick a live event during peak evening hours, because live sport is when capacity gets tight and it is the moment most people judge and drop a service. Keep two diagnostics in mind while you watch. Scope tells you who owns a fault: one bad channel is a source issue, a whole group failing is server side, everything failing at once is your line, your player or the session. Switching away and back tells you which of those it was, because instant recovery means the session stalled and bandwidth was never the problem. Note what happened with timestamps, then decide with evidence rather than an impression.

Convert everything to twelve-month totals before comparing, because monthly figures hide the difference. Ours is $120 for the year at $10 a month. A typical US cable or satellite bill of $70-130 a month is $840 to $1,560 across the same period, before equipment rental. Streaming bundles at $40-90 a month land between $480 and $1,080, and they usually renew on their own with a card on file. The gap is not an argument that cheaper is automatically right. It is an argument for asking what the extra several hundred dollars is buying, and for testing the cheap option properly before you assume it cannot hold up.