So after years of paying anywhere from $60 to $85 a month for cable or satellite tv, I finally followed my pal @Vandy4Life and cut the cord back in April; actually he's only been a Vandy fan 15 years, but that's another story. Anyway, I had discovered XBMC/Kodi about 3 years ago. At first I found it confusing, frustrating, and annoying. I actually quit using, because I didn't understand the whole repository thing. So happens I was shopping in the Opry Mills Mall, when someone at the Game-stop store had a homemade XBMC shirt. I struck up a conversation, and he was like dude just YouTube it. That I did, and after that I completely fell in love with XBMC. This was my first baby steps in cord cutting, that lead to where I am now. At the time, I mainly used it for tv shows and movies, but there were some live streaming addons as well; I might be misspelling addons. Mashup, SportsDevil, and Navi-X were the main ones I used, and I basically watching sub-links on Mashup. As with all things in life things evolve, change, and sometimes goes away.
XBMC evolved into Gotham, Isengard, Helix, and its now morphed into Kodi; not addon continued. This was the case for my beloved Mashup, because I think around 18 to 24 months ago the developer shut it down. The bulk of my live streaming went down with it, and caused me to research other addons to replace it. I tried so many different free addons, but most of them were just meh. I still to this day can't remember how I stumbled across it, but somehow I found the Hqzone. This started my journey into paid streaming addons for Kodi. They had some 1 week trial I signed up for, and they did have better quality than the free ones. As I seriously thought about subscribing, I research similar addons. I noticed a little Twitter war between the Zone and Sports Access. SA might have been called something else then, but that's what it is now; also found Sports Donkey and later Sports Mania.
So I've board you to death with my journey to this point, so for the rest of my blog I want to compare Sports Access, Sports Donkey, and Sports Mania in terms of product, service, and value. These are only my opinions, but I think you'll find them valid. So I'll start with my the first ever service I committed to Sports Access https://twitter.com/NoBuffZone . The current cost is around $160 dollars a year, but they do offer a Black Friday special around $100 for a 1 year subscription. The service has really evolved from 20 to 30 channels to around 70 at the moment. They have all the big UFC, PPV, and huge sporting events. During football season, they have all the NFL games each week and a huge selection of college games. The same can be said for racing, tennis, golf, MMA, basketball and pro baseball. They have all the major sports channels, and even some regular tv channels: HBO, Showtime, and several other cable channels. They best thing is there's little to no buffering on their streams. I can go the entire even without one hiccup on most occasion. I've been a subscriber for about 20 months, and they've had a few outages from time to time. I think last year they were down for about a month, which lead me to my second service Sports Donkey.
I had read several good reviews about Sports Donkey and with SA down, I decided to try it http://www.sportsdonkey.club/ . For around $60 a year, they have a lot of content and most of the events Sports Access has. They have a huge selection of American sports, but maybe a little more of the Euro stuff with their streams. They too have Showtime, HBO, and all the major sporting events as well. They offer a lot of variety, but their streams will buffer more frequently than SA. I've watched several MLB games and UFC events on it with little issue. Overall, its a great value and they haven't had any outages that I know of. Finally, the last add on I've tried is SportsMania.eu . I came across them from a poll on the best paid apps on Kodi. They were like 2nd in the poll, so I wanted to see what they offered. Let me say up front, I believe they have the most content and channels. For less they $60 a year, you get alot of streams. They have streams from all over the world, and I've watched some MMA and a few baseball games. It has all the American sports channels, but I think it has the most amount euro based channels. If not it sure seems that way. Unfortunately, most streams I've tried seems to buffer quite frequently. I did watch a Toronto Blue Jays games on 7/23/16 that seemed to run smoothly. How on earth they were rated so high in that pole is perplexing. They must have stuffed the ballet box like the KC Royals at the MLB All-star game, because SM simply didn't perform up to expectations.
So let's wrap this up shall we? Each service has way more to offer than the current free addons on Kodi, and I depend on them for my streaming. I plan on keeping 2 of them, in case one goes down or forced offline. While I miss having pure 1080P from Dish Network, I don't miss paying the $$$$$ each month. Based on my time with SportsMania, I simply can't recommend it; unless you're into world sports and less American based. It constantly buffers and the HD streams look SD on my TV. Initially for value and service, I thought Sports Donkey for it's price and number of channels. SD is $60 a year while SA is $160, unless you get the black Friday special. The more I considered it, Sports Access is the better service. With all the channels, little to no buffering, and customer support, it edges SD. I like the Donkey, and still watch it a lot. For the linup, customer support, and quality of streams SA has been the best package. I didn't even talk about the members gifts Sports Access gives it subscribers for free. The only knock on Sports Access is that it seems to go down every now and then, but normally for short periods of time. Users on Twitters go ape, because they think they've been had. Then again, we are paying for something that could shut down at anytime. I hope not.
Not sure if this has helped anyone who might be considering subscribing to a Kodi addon, but you can't go wrong with Sports Donkey and Sports Access. If there are better ones out there, please let me know. I'm not playing on going back to cable anytime soon, and I wouldn't mind having better live streaming of channels. I've heard about a couple services, but I'm not ready to fork over the $$$$ for them yet.
