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How Kodi Took Over Piracy (wired.com)
A reader shares a report: For years, piracy persisted mainly in the realm of torrents, with sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid connecting internet denizens to premium content gratis. But a confluence of factors have sent torrent usage plummeting from 23 percent of all North American daily internet traffic in 2011 to under 5 percent last year. Legal crackdowns shuttered prominent torrent sites. Paid alternatives like Netflix and Hulu made it easier just to pay up. And then there were the "fully loaded" Kodi boxes -- otherwise vanilla streaming devices that come with, or make easily accessible, so-called addons that seek out unlicensed content -- that deliver pirated movies and TV shows with push-button ease. "Kodi and the plugin system and the people who made these plugins have just dumbed down the process," says Dan Deeth, spokesperson for network-equipment company Sandvine. "It's easy for anyone to use. It's kind of set it and forget it. Like the Ron Popeil turkey roaster." Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of North American households have a Kodi device configured to access unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future.
Is this the same Sandvine whose business model included spoofing data packets to discourage bittorrent activity, regardless of whether the content being torrented was legal?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
It's necessary to point out that there is plenty of legitimate use cases in Kodi. For example, playing videos and displaying photo slideshows from a home media server, or allowing me to interact from just about any device in my network with my DVR - watching and scheduling recordings as well as live TV.
I resent hyperbolic click baiting media dragging Kodi's name thru the mud with sensational headlines "How Kodi took over piracy" when authors know full well its misleading bullshit.