So I asked direct or via reseller, poor replies but I guess asking the question in r/IPTV Resellers is kind of a loaded question. I guess some direct sellers or let's just call them hosters were reluctant to challenge the assertion that resellers add more customer service.
Ok so far so good. Now how can you tell the difference between a reseller and a hoster, certainly the gray area is what some resellers rely on for the uninitiated. I guess some resellers are happy to state upfront what they are, others like the cloud of mystery so they can pretend they are hosters.
By the way is anyone tracking how many hosted and resellers there are in the global market and who is tracking whoch ones dis-appear and re-appear under a different name. That really annoys me. Maybe it just goes with the turf, by this I mean IPTV is a black market so your to get scammers.
Resellers seem to have agreements with the services that they are reselling that requires them to rebrand the service. They’re not allowed to advertise that they are reselling X service.
It also works out in their favor because they can sell the service for whatever they want as long as they cover their reseller credits - while resellers are usually cheaper than going directly to the host service, there are just as many that charge more (sometimes a lot more) than the host service would.
Unfortunately I don’t think you’re going to get the answer you’re looking for. First off, most of the host services are still restreaming most of the channels from a source higher than them to begin with and secondly, if it was easy to trace where everything was coming from and it was common knowledge, it would be easy to shut down, not to mention that third down the list is that if you were able to go direct, they would lose money from losing your sub.
IPTV is setup very much in a MLM fashion from what I’ve seen, the only difference being that nobody on the lower levels knows who sits at the top.