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Hollywood Strikes Back Against Illegal Streaming Kodi Add-ons (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
For once they're going after the exact source of the problems instead of casting a net so wide that would have put the whole Kodi team itself in trouble.
#DeleteFacebook
I have several options when it comes to consuming video content: I have and external antenna on my home, a Roku device with Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts, Playstation Vue for 'cable' channels, a Plex server on my network, AND a 'Kodi box'. The Kodi system is my absolute LAST choice when it comes to finding something to watch. Yeah, there are all sorts of 'pirate-like' add ons for Kodi that will allow me to search for, select, and (maybe) stream content. The selection process is cumbersome, the streams are unreliable at best, and the entire 'pirate' system is a kludge which reminds me - showing my advanced age here - of what AOL did to IRC - put a fancy GUI in front of it, call it a proprietary spec, and 'dumb down' the userbase. The guys at TPB are laughing in their beer over the crap that's been foisted on people because nobody is willing to look under the hood and recognize what's going on. Yep - I can download the same content in minutes, throw it on the Plex server, and not have to worry about lag, bad streams, changing network conditions, or whatever. Bittorrent (in this usage) is no less illegal, and it's a hell of a lot more reliable. Not to mention that fully 95% of the content I want to watch is available to stream from LEGAL sources within 24-48 hours after it's released anyway....
People just want easy access to content.
If there's an easy way to get it that MPAA, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and others can actually support (and ideally offer a more reliable service with better UX and more content), then the "need" for these illegal add-ons will diminish radically. Then it's okay to pick off the bigger facilitators if they're still too big for comfort.
MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
At some point, these content providers will realize that their content is actually worth something on its own. They'll be fine releasing free and open source software that can securely log in and stream their content to paying customers without an iota of non-free software on the client system.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Most libraries have shelves full of Blu-Ray and DVD movies to lend.
Some libraries allow you to stream movies with your membership (in addition to ebooks and music) for free.
Check with, and donate to your local libraries. They can use the money or time.