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.

Comments

There's a fix.

[pecosdave]

If content creators don's want people pirating their content they can make it more easily accessible.

I would LOVE to have a Netflix plugin that works with Kodi so I didn't have to switch inputs and start my Playstation.

I USED to have a an app that could play Amazon video without having to switch inputs and turn on my Playstation, but Amazon actively thwarted the software that only worked if I paid my Prime anyways.

I would love it if I could just watch Hulu from Kodi without having to switch inputs and turn on my Playstation.

Really I could just leave my Kodi box running and watch all of the movies I paid for by streaming it from the Kodi box to the Playstation, but let's face it, Kodi has a great interface.

I CAN play a bunch of PBS stuff legally on my Kodi box, I can play some random stuff from various local TV stations that have an accessible on-ramp, including some national networks,100% legally. That's not quite as slick as using the Playstation, but it's not horrible.

TO fix the problem you don't have to start giving everything away for free, but not being pricks about APIs would fix a lot of it.

Re:What is it?

[ottothecow]

Generally the way these things work is that they just have a bunch of connections to illicit streaming sites...and the nicer ones include ongoing updates and customer support to keep you ahead of the inevitable site shutdowns. They aren't really tied to the Kodi project other than the fact that they found a really good free media player that they could attach their addons to.

That being said...Kodi probably wouldn't exist without piracy. I'd wager the majority of Kodi users have amassed at least some of their media collection through illicit means. There are so many ways to set up kodi with automatic usenet/torrent downloaders, and the built in library parsers are great at figuring out what you have from standard scene naming conventions...for every person who has filled their library solely with purchased and ripped DVDs...there are probably 10 who have a bunch of torrented stuff (especially since most non-physical-media ways of purchasing content are not compatible with Kodi).

Although I once stayed at a hotel that had a customized kodi installation on a box attached to the back of their TVs with the usual sort of hotel menu options. It wasn't branded Kodi, but I noticed the sound effects were familiar and I restarted it to watch the bootup sequence. I googled the company that made it a bit and could find very little info...I strongly suspected that they were probably in violation of the GPL, but never followed it further. The closest I got was some guy posting in search of technical support with pasted log files that contained the company name in some file paths (and the guy's name showed up on linkedin as an intern at the company).