7 ms·

How the Kodi Box Took Over Piracy

122 points by adidash 9y ago

bhouston 9y ago
I was surprised by how prevelant these boxes are. It seems that every second family with kids has these and are streaming media to it. These families had no idea what torrents are, but were using pirated content basically every day and streaming it a la netflix. It is the future of piracy for sure. I suspect it is many many times larger in scope that torrents are currently. (BTW I do not have one of these.)
- hotgoldminer 9y ago
  I know several people with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy. They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it. How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore?
  - bsilvereagle 9y ago
    > with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy > They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it. I would too! Kodi itself isn't theft/piracy. Kodi is a FOSS media manager that is extremely extensible. Several extensions enabling piracy have been created by third-party developers. This may seem pedantic, but it is extremely important to differentiate between a FOSS media manager and piracy-oriented plugins.
    - _fzslm 9y ago
      It's not pedantic at all! As is repeatedly said, it's like calling Google Chrome a piracy application because you can go to The Pirate Bay with it.
    - laumars 9y ago
      It's not pedantic at all. It's literally the same as people running torrent clients on Windows and thus then calling Windows a piracy tool. The term "Kodi box" really annoys me because the core tools that people buy these "Kodi boxes" for are 3rd party applications that happen to execute inside Kodi's plugin system but otherwise are not affiliated with Kodi at all. They're not even included in the Kodi's official repositories.
      - deleted 9y ago
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  - deleted 9y ago
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  - mavhc 9y ago
    It's not theft, or piracy, it's copyright infringement.
  - Nullabillity 9y ago
    > How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore? Stop thinking of it as paying for a physical product, and start thinking of it as a tip jar for making more stuff in the future.
    - rhino369 9y ago
      Why would anyone think tip jar as a business model is a good idea? Do people really want a world where the Battle of the Bastards stops so Jon Snow can tell you about how much he loves Sonos Speakers, how he uses Blue Apron, and then reads a list of Patreon supporters?
      - Spivak 9y ago
        So commercials? The thing that basically every streaming platform has sans a Netflix and HBO.
    - thirdsun 9y ago
      You can't be serious. How would you feel if your salary was generated by a tip jar? IP owners are free to set their terms and you're welcome to not purchase their content if don't agree with them. Don't get me wrong - I don't like the DRM-ridden practices of the movie industry either and wish they would copy the music industry, which allows me to buy their content DRM-free wherever I want.
      - Nullabillity 9y ago
        This is already how all digital content works, it's just a question of whether producers and lawmakers are ready to admit it yet.
        thirdsun 9y ago
        It's not, unless by all you mean some digital content. Donation-based content is still the exception and I think it's fine for creators to set a definitive price/value for their work as they see fit. I buy my music digitally, lossless for a one-time flat fee and I own the content, ready to played with any player/software I can think of. With software and games it's slightly different since there's usually DRM involved, yet there's rarely a tip jar to be seen.
  - disconnected 9y ago
    > How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore? Maybe it is time to admit that copyright is obsolete? If crime is rampant, then there are only two possibilities: either society has collapsed and the rule of law no longer applies, or the law itself is broken, and is unjustly penalizing people for doing something that is perfectly normal and acceptable or desirable. I'm looking out the window and there aren't cars on fire. I'm leaning towards the latter. So called "intellectual property" needs a deep reform. It probably made sense a century ago, but it doesn't make sense today, where copying and transmitting data and ideas is so simple that it happens by accident. As for IP owners and their "profits", I say fuck em. Selling "copies" is an obsolete business model. The software world has already figured this out ages ago: services are where the real money is. Netflix and Amazon are making a huge chunk of money with their streaming offerings. Microsoft's Azure and Amazon AWS are making their respective companies a huge chunk of cash. Hell, Microsoft is even giving Windows 10 (Home, but still) away for free now. The media companies need to adapt, but greedy fucks that they are, they refused to do that. In the age of digital, they still want to sell you DVDs, CDs and physical books. Worse: the digital copies in some instances cost almost as much as the - scarce - physical copies. WTF? So, again, fuck em. They needed to adapt, but they have been resisting change and throwing roadbloacks at every intersection, and generally, being a nuisance. If they go down in flames, serves them right.
    - SteveMoody73 9y ago
      And in the case of DVDs playing ads that can't be skipped and a warning about piracy that would actually make the pirated version so much more pleasant to watch to the viewer. One of the reasons I've not bought a DVD in years and mainly stream shows now.
  - jpalomaki 9y ago
    If charging for the content or showing separate ads is not an option, one solution is to setup sponsorship agreements and/or build the advertising into the shows. Creative people can probably come up with also more subtle ways for doing this than the obvious Apple or Dell logo on computer or laptop or Pepsi can on the table. I could imagine some cross media campaigns for example which start to blur the division between shows and reality. For more efficient targeting you could switch to airing the shows through social network sites, like Facebook and Twitter. This way you could actually tailor the products placements for different customer segments based on their profile. With the current level of computer graphics this is getting feasible. For example in sport events they are already dynamically imposing the ads on the side of the field to TV feed (so that you can show different ads to different markets)[1] [1] http://www.supponor.com/ http://www.supponor.com/
- octalmage 9y ago
  My dad got one on because a coworker told him about it. It's a Fire stick you can buy on eBay that comes preloaded with Exodus. He has no clue how or why it works, just that it has every movie and TV show for free. Which is better than all of the other services combined. I pirated a bunch of stuff when I was younger because I didn't have cable, but now it's easier to pay thanks to Netflix and all that. But like others have said I'm not going to pay $10 a month for each network. They need to work together to get their content on a single platform. People are going to do the easiest thing, and currently Exodus is winning.
dazbradbury 9y ago
"In the UK, Kodi boxes have garnered more attention from authorities, thanks to stingy soccer fanatics driving an early swell of adoption" This is very unfair. I don't own a Kodi box, but in the UK it's against the law to show football games on TV on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm [1]. So it's not "stingy" football fans, it's fans that have no other way to watch a 3pm kick off without actually going to the game itself. No matter how much someone may be willing to spend, a game being sold out / distance from home / time commitments etc. are all non-stingy reasons to not be able to watch a game. It sounds like Kodi boxes have fulfilled that desire, rather than allowing people to circumvent a paid service as the article implies. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television#3pm_.22Blackout.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...
- have_faith 9y ago
  We both know full well that mass football fan adoption of the service isn't just to watch the odd game at that specific time on one day of the week. You're right that it isn't strictly "stingy", but wanting something you've been denied isn't a good reason to take it.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    "take" isn't a great word for this context, since it implies something lost by the other party.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    The standard reason for not pirating is that it cost the producers money. In the case where they won't sell it at prices (some) people would pay for, who does piracy hurt?
    - have_faith 9y ago
      I don't see "they won't sell it to me at a price I like" as justification for pirating it yourself as if it's somehow deserved. I would much prefer people use an argument not based on whether or not the cost means you should be allowed to have it or not.
retSava 9y ago
Argh, this must be so frustrating for the Kodi devs...! There really is a very strong case for running a Kodi-box for ones own legit collection, and now it's just mentioned for the (admittedly, probably) not so slight share of piracy. MPAA and friends has turned their eye on Kodi since a while ago, like Sauron on the little hobbitses. Could this be a submarine piece?
- snerbles 9y ago
  > Could this be a submarine piece? Considering that Wired is a legacy media (Condé Nast) publication, it's not inconceivable.
  - Digit-Al 9y ago
    Who would financially benefit enough to pay for it though? There's no one big seller of the boxes and the software is free. Edit: For clarification - I'm not saying it's impossible. I just personally can't see any obvious beneficiary. Would welcome any suggestions though.
- m-p-3 9y ago
  Thanks to Kodi, my Steam Link has been repurposed into something I actually use.
  - Splines 9y ago
    How's the performance on it? I tried it recently and found it pretty unsatisfactory. Maybe it was the media - I read somewhere that if the file needs transcoding it's all in software.
- gatesphere 9y ago
  What is a submarine piece?
  - Jun8 9y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
deleted 9y ago
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microcolonel 9y ago
Just think for a second about the hyperbole involved in even calling it piracy. Piracy implies not only theft, which isn't applicable since there is no deprivation, but the pillage of a vessel on the high seas, and the kidnapping (and possibly enslavement, slaughter, rape, or drowning) of its crew. I think that this (and a whole system of) hyperbole has made it impossible to even talk about it. The MPAA and other similar organizations clutch to legalism, in my opinion, at the cost of revenues to rights holders. On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues. If rights holders would standardize licensing, and allow a wide variety of distributors to make consuming their content more convenient and a better experience than torrenting, then their revenues would recover; and since there are more people willing and able to pay for a service like this today than when the recording industries came to be, revenue per head can be lower while still funding better content than ever. Added: Another working model is paid DRM-free downloads. I only buy music in open and lossless formats, which in practice means Bandcamp, a few independent online publishers (like Hospital Records), and CDs. I pay for it because I don't want to feel used while listening to music, and I don't want to rely on ongoing permission to listen to something I've paid for explicitly. This is a different stage of the on-demand/streaming userbase, when they want to have a copy of a record which lasts longer than Spotify Inc.
- stonogo 9y ago
  Yeah, turns out language changes. The TRIPS agreement defines piracy in terms that have nothing to do with shivering timbers. As for "standardized rights", that kind of shit is what leads to taxes on media like blank CDs or, before them, cassette tape, and -- worst of all -- organizations like ASCAP getting royalty payments by default, whether they're entitled to them or not. Any effort to "standardize" rights management generally turns into a club with which entrenched interests beat down innovation or dissent. Just let them burn out with their shit business models; we don't need them anyway.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > Any effort to "standardize" rights management generally turns into a club with which entrenched interests beat down innovation or dissent. ...then don't license your rights in that format, are you thinking I'm saying the government of the United States should be responsible for determining the licensing terms of media? I'm just thinking that there could be some standardized package with official masters, metadata, and rates, which any old streaming provider could register for, download, reencode, and start sending the revenues their way. Beyond that, rights holders obviously retain the right to strike cheaper or higher-service deals with specific providers, or to stop licensing their content, just like before. I don't mean sell every TV show and movie at the same price, I don't mean forfeit your rights, I don't mean anything of the sort, I mean standardize the agreement format. > Just let them burn out with their shit business models; we don't need them anyway. But in the future, how will we access media from the on-demand age, or which is no longer available DRM-free?
Overtonwindow 9y ago
I am adamantly opposed to the MPAA in every way. The movie and television industries act more like a colluding monopoly than a business. The prices and costs have risen much too high out of greed, and by some strange quirk, they're using the legal and regulatory systems to gouge the public. This goes far beyond just pirating television shows. It's Comcast, net neutrality, set top boxes, and massive media conglomerates all rolled into one.
madengr 9y ago
I have an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. I use it for watching the original 26 years of Dr. Who; that’s it.
alistproducer2 9y ago
I would totally support micro-payments to content producers as opposed to the status quo. Until then.....Kodi all day baby! Cut the cord and never going back! I, however, didn't buy one pre-packaged. I did it the "hard" way and installed it on a Rpi3. If only I could play netflix on it, it would be perfect.
- Crosseye_Jack 9y ago
  You need the widevine lib but I was under the impression that recent builds of kodi could support Amazon Prime and Netflix content via plugins (valid accounts for both are obv needed) https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p Why, though? Isn't the Pi CPU the same family that's also in smartphones, where Netflix works even with the FHD (or Retina!) screens everyone and their dog puts in a smartphone?
    - Crosseye_Jack 9y ago
      It seems to be down to inputstream.adaptive which is the bridge between widevine and kodi. See all the decoding has to be done in software and atm inputstream.adaptive isn’t refined/optimised enough for lower end CPUs such as what powers the RPI. Remember that the rpi is designed to be cheap. The whole rpi3 board is sold for $35 which still makes a profit for the board manufacturers and the Raspberry Pi foundation. So “corners” had to be cut somewhere and using a less powerful CPU helps keep the cost down. Note: The devs believe they will be able to get 1080p widevine protect content to playback smoothly sooner or later, but as of the last time I looked at it, that belief is a best guess, I dunno if they have optimised the code yet or if they have changed their opinion of if/when it will be done.
omg_ketchup 9y ago
There's a massive gap between the pirate service and the "legitimate" media service. For one, you can just type something in, and get the movie you want. You don't have to navigate between 15 different services, and then find out the film is only available on mail-order DVD, or in other countries. For television, the networks are HORRIBLE about providing their content to cord-cutters. Want to watch the latest episode of Mr. Robot, which airs on Wednesday at 10pm? You're gonna have to wait AT LEAST until 9am on Thursday morning, WITH YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Or, you can pirate it for free. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said, but Piracy is not a payment issue, it's an access issue. Also, companies being greedy is a bad look. CBS hiding Star Trek behind their proprietary $10/month service is going to kill Star Trek, because the intended audience sees it as a bullshit cash grab. Put it on Hulu you greedy bastards.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  "not a payment issue, it's an access issue." ... "bullshit cash grab" So in other words, it's a payment issue? Let's say you watch $100/month for cable, and watch about 3 hours a day. That's over $3/hour. $10/month for 4 hours a TV is cheaper than cable, it's ad-free (I believe) and it's more convenient. It's expensive compared to Netflix or piracy, but it can certainly be argued it's not a cash grab.
  - xzel 9y ago
    I don't think its fair to boil the two points he made into the same argument. He said too many services and timing issues and one thing about Star Trek. His second point is pretty specific to occurrence, companies taking their shows off 3rd party streaming services and putting them behind their own paywall. That is definitely a cash grab and its become more common, in my opinion.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      That's exactly my point. There are two issues: cost and access. The OP said "It's not a payment issue, it's an access issue." I say it's both.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I wonder how these plugins actually works. With traditional pirate sites, the business model is usually clear cut: webistes get income from ads, uploaders get money from hosting services and the latter get the money from user buying their premium accounts. With torrents, there is some exchange, too - each downloader is a seeder. But in the case of plugins?
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  For live sports it's typically just scripts that extract media from the flash player sites like firstrow. They piggyback off the content from the ad-sustained websites, but without showing the ads. The sites like firstrow can't do anything about it because they are not actually hosting the streams themselves, they're just embedding players from various live streaming services. For movies, etc., my understanding is that it's P2P a la popcorntime.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    OK, so if it's P2P, wouldn't it actually make the plugin users liable for making copyrighted content available (in contrast to simply downloading the stream)?
    - nickysielicki 9y ago
      I did some digging and I think I was wrong above when I made that distinction about live and recorded content. P2P can be done for live sports via sopcast/acestream/etc, and (as far as I can tell) this seems more popular than the method I described above (eg: ripping content from live stream websites) for live sports, due to the quality difference. In addition, P2P addons for movies a la popcorntime do exist, but the biggest addons that I have heard of: Genesis and Exodus, just rip content from file host sites. But yes, if they're doing P2P, they're definitely liable to get letters. I think people overestimate the frequency of people getting caught for p2p file sharing, especially for live things that appear and disappear quickly.
- octalmage 9y ago
nickysielicki 9y ago
Anyone else have fond memories of playing around with a modchipped original Xbox? I know I do. I think I still have that thing somewhere in a box, XECUTER3 and all. I don't think the article makes a big enough point about Kodi being rooted in XBMC, and XBMC being a project that started on the Xbox homebrew scene. Kodi's roots in XBMC are inherently tied to piracy, because every early developer and user had to chip their xbox, and they probably did that so that they could pirated games. That filters who is going to be contributing and using the project, so it's no surprise that movie and music piracy addons popped up with time when you consider that one of the first features of XBMC in the first place was being a launcher for pirated games. Don't get me wrong, XBMC always has had a legitimate and legal use case, and Kodi certainly has a legitimate and legal use today. But the roots of the project had to do with piracy and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the project attracted piracy addons and continues to.
- octalmage 9y ago
  I have very fond memories of those days. I remember the first time I saw the Linux boot loader after a successful exploit using Mech assault, my buddy and I high five'd. The project has obviously come along way since those days, and could probably not be as successful with Xbox in the name or with the stigma attached to it. Hence the rebrand. Their only chance at making it is to distance themselves as much as possible from the piracy. The reason it's attractive to (pirate) plugin developers is that it's cross platform (they've already figured out how to get it on AppleTV for example), and a generic enough API. You can write Python to hit a webpage, find a URL, and tell Kodi to play it. Kodi has also solved distribution (repositories) and auto updates. I get it.
- electriclove 9y ago
  I modded my original Xbox for XBMP/XBMC. I never played Xbox games on it though I did play emulated classics. Not sure if that is typical or not..
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  Very fond memories. Never thought it would be so (relatively) easy to hack wide open such a well protected system like the Xbox. It was so much fun and i learned a lot in the process about BIOSes and firmware. It also taught me that any device can be (ab)used to the max if you just have the right tools and knowledge. Some exploits are so amazingly easy. XBMC/Kodi is awesome. I bet there will be a lot of copy procjets if they ever try to lock it down.
jdhawk 9y ago
I'm sure all of these boxes come pre-configured with a VPN Service, but all the standard protocols can still be detected with Deep Packet Inspection, something I've seen AT&T do (and block) pretty effectively. I guess there area always the StealthVPN/Chameleon providers out there that try and mask the signature of "what" is going over the VPN - but enough of that and I'm sure they'll nix those connections as well.
- SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
  DPI is a sham, most of those specialized HW (sold by pseudo IT security gurus) just assume that any VPN connection "is bad" and procced to block them, there is no way to detect a pattern on a (decently-configured) VPN, there is a reason China (the biggest investor on that this type of tech) is mandating Apple and Google to delete all the VPN apps on their stores.
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
Well most of my friend that have one those Kodi-boxes used to paid subscriptions for pirate-content IPTV providers for Roku but since Roku started to fightback and ban the most popular pirate content providers it was only matter of time before they find someone willing to sell them an alternative.
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
This fight will end with Kodi removing addon support on the next version and some fork taking over the work.
CaptSpify 9y ago
It drives me insane that we keep thinking that digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. It makes no sense to me that we think of distribution as "hard". Distribution is soooo easy, and it's effectively free. The only reason we have these gatekeepers in the way now (hbo, netflix, etc) is that we haven't figured out a way to fix our antiquated financial models. I don't see "piracy" as a problem, I see it as more efficient in our current situation.
kyle-rb 9y ago
>That ease applies to creating the piracy addons themselves. Since primarily all they do is find existing sites that host pirated content, grab working links, and present them in Kodi's user-friendly interface, Betzen rates the complexity about the same as creating a simple web page. This seems like an oversimplification. Most sites that host pirated content want you to watch that content within their website; so they can get their ad revenue and mine cryptocurrencies while you watch. They intentionally make it hard to get at their content, so in most cases, it's significantly harder than "creating a simple web page."

122 points by adidash 9y ago

I was surprised by how prevelant these boxes are. It seems that every second family with kids has these and are streaming media to it. These families had no idea what torrents are, but were using pirated content basically every day and streaming it a la netflix. It is the future of piracy for sure. I suspect it is many many times larger in scope that torrents are currently. (BTW I do not have one of these.)

hotgoldminer 9y ago
I know several people with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy. They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it. How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore?
- bsilvereagle 9y ago
  > with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy > They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it. I would too! Kodi itself isn't theft/piracy. Kodi is a FOSS media manager that is extremely extensible. Several extensions enabling piracy have been created by third-party developers. This may seem pedantic, but it is extremely important to differentiate between a FOSS media manager and piracy-oriented plugins.
  - _fzslm 9y ago
    It's not pedantic at all! As is repeatedly said, it's like calling Google Chrome a piracy application because you can go to The Pirate Bay with it.
  - laumars 9y ago
    It's not pedantic at all. It's literally the same as people running torrent clients on Windows and thus then calling Windows a piracy tool. The term "Kodi box" really annoys me because the core tools that people buy these "Kodi boxes" for are 3rd party applications that happen to execute inside Kodi's plugin system but otherwise are not affiliated with Kodi at all. They're not even included in the Kodi's official repositories.
    - deleted 9y ago
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- mavhc 9y ago
  It's not theft, or piracy, it's copyright infringement.
- Nullabillity 9y ago
  > How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore? Stop thinking of it as paying for a physical product, and start thinking of it as a tip jar for making more stuff in the future.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    Why would anyone think tip jar as a business model is a good idea? Do people really want a world where the Battle of the Bastards stops so Jon Snow can tell you about how much he loves Sonos Speakers, how he uses Blue Apron, and then reads a list of Patreon supporters?
    - Spivak 9y ago
      So commercials? The thing that basically every streaming platform has sans a Netflix and HBO.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    You can't be serious. How would you feel if your salary was generated by a tip jar? IP owners are free to set their terms and you're welcome to not purchase their content if don't agree with them. Don't get me wrong - I don't like the DRM-ridden practices of the movie industry either and wish they would copy the music industry, which allows me to buy their content DRM-free wherever I want.
    - Nullabillity 9y ago
      This is already how all digital content works, it's just a question of whether producers and lawmakers are ready to admit it yet.
      - thirdsun 9y ago
        It's not, unless by all you mean some digital content. Donation-based content is still the exception and I think it's fine for creators to set a definitive price/value for their work as they see fit. I buy my music digitally, lossless for a one-time flat fee and I own the content, ready to played with any player/software I can think of. With software and games it's slightly different since there's usually DRM involved, yet there's rarely a tip jar to be seen.
- disconnected 9y ago
  > How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore? Maybe it is time to admit that copyright is obsolete? If crime is rampant, then there are only two possibilities: either society has collapsed and the rule of law no longer applies, or the law itself is broken, and is unjustly penalizing people for doing something that is perfectly normal and acceptable or desirable. I'm looking out the window and there aren't cars on fire. I'm leaning towards the latter. So called "intellectual property" needs a deep reform. It probably made sense a century ago, but it doesn't make sense today, where copying and transmitting data and ideas is so simple that it happens by accident. As for IP owners and their "profits", I say fuck em. Selling "copies" is an obsolete business model. The software world has already figured this out ages ago: services are where the real money is. Netflix and Amazon are making a huge chunk of money with their streaming offerings. Microsoft's Azure and Amazon AWS are making their respective companies a huge chunk of cash. Hell, Microsoft is even giving Windows 10 (Home, but still) away for free now. The media companies need to adapt, but greedy fucks that they are, they refused to do that. In the age of digital, they still want to sell you DVDs, CDs and physical books. Worse: the digital copies in some instances cost almost as much as the - scarce - physical copies. WTF? So, again, fuck em. They needed to adapt, but they have been resisting change and throwing roadbloacks at every intersection, and generally, being a nuisance. If they go down in flames, serves them right.
  - SteveMoody73 9y ago
    And in the case of DVDs playing ads that can't be skipped and a warning about piracy that would actually make the pirated version so much more pleasant to watch to the viewer. One of the reasons I've not bought a DVD in years and mainly stream shows now.
- jpalomaki 9y ago
  If charging for the content or showing separate ads is not an option, one solution is to setup sponsorship agreements and/or build the advertising into the shows. Creative people can probably come up with also more subtle ways for doing this than the obvious Apple or Dell logo on computer or laptop or Pepsi can on the table. I could imagine some cross media campaigns for example which start to blur the division between shows and reality. For more efficient targeting you could switch to airing the shows through social network sites, like Facebook and Twitter. This way you could actually tailor the products placements for different customer segments based on their profile. With the current level of computer graphics this is getting feasible. For example in sport events they are already dynamically imposing the ads on the side of the field to TV feed (so that you can show different ads to different markets)[1] [1] http://www.supponor.com/ http://www.supponor.com/
octalmage 9y ago
My dad got one on because a coworker told him about it. It's a Fire stick you can buy on eBay that comes preloaded with Exodus. He has no clue how or why it works, just that it has every movie and TV show for free. Which is better than all of the other services combined. I pirated a bunch of stuff when I was younger because I didn't have cable, but now it's easier to pay thanks to Netflix and all that. But like others have said I'm not going to pay $10 a month for each network. They need to work together to get their content on a single platform. People are going to do the easiest thing, and currently Exodus is winning.

dazbradbury 9y ago

"In the UK, Kodi boxes have garnered more attention from authorities, thanks to stingy soccer fanatics driving an early swell of adoption" This is very unfair. I don't own a Kodi box, but in the UK it's against the law to show football games on TV on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm [1]. So it's not "stingy" football fans, it's fans that have no other way to watch a 3pm kick off without actually going to the game itself. No matter how much someone may be willing to spend, a game being sold out / distance from home / time commitments etc. are all non-stingy reasons to not be able to watch a game. It sounds like Kodi boxes have fulfilled that desire, rather than allowing people to circumvent a paid service as the article implies. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television#3pm_.22Blackout.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...

have_faith 9y ago
We both know full well that mass football fan adoption of the service isn't just to watch the odd game at that specific time on one day of the week. You're right that it isn't strictly "stingy", but wanting something you've been denied isn't a good reason to take it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  "take" isn't a great word for this context, since it implies something lost by the other party.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  The standard reason for not pirating is that it cost the producers money. In the case where they won't sell it at prices (some) people would pay for, who does piracy hurt?
  - have_faith 9y ago
    I don't see "they won't sell it to me at a price I like" as justification for pirating it yourself as if it's somehow deserved. I would much prefer people use an argument not based on whether or not the cost means you should be allowed to have it or not.

retSava 9y ago

Argh, this must be so frustrating for the Kodi devs...! There really is a very strong case for running a Kodi-box for ones own legit collection, and now it's just mentioned for the (admittedly, probably) not so slight share of piracy. MPAA and friends has turned their eye on Kodi since a while ago, like Sauron on the little hobbitses. Could this be a submarine piece?

snerbles 9y ago
> Could this be a submarine piece? Considering that Wired is a legacy media (Condé Nast) publication, it's not inconceivable.
- Digit-Al 9y ago
  Who would financially benefit enough to pay for it though? There's no one big seller of the boxes and the software is free. Edit: For clarification - I'm not saying it's impossible. I just personally can't see any obvious beneficiary. Would welcome any suggestions though.
m-p-3 9y ago
Thanks to Kodi, my Steam Link has been repurposed into something I actually use.
- Splines 9y ago
  How's the performance on it? I tried it recently and found it pretty unsatisfactory. Maybe it was the media - I read somewhere that if the file needs transcoding it's all in software.
gatesphere 9y ago
What is a submarine piece?
- Jun8 9y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

microcolonel 9y ago

Just think for a second about the hyperbole involved in even calling it piracy. Piracy implies not only theft, which isn't applicable since there is no deprivation, but the pillage of a vessel on the high seas, and the kidnapping (and possibly enslavement, slaughter, rape, or drowning) of its crew. I think that this (and a whole system of) hyperbole has made it impossible to even talk about it. The MPAA and other similar organizations clutch to legalism, in my opinion, at the cost of revenues to rights holders. On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues. If rights holders would standardize licensing, and allow a wide variety of distributors to make consuming their content more convenient and a better experience than torrenting, then their revenues would recover; and since there are more people willing and able to pay for a service like this today than when the recording industries came to be, revenue per head can be lower while still funding better content than ever. Added: Another working model is paid DRM-free downloads. I only buy music in open and lossless formats, which in practice means Bandcamp, a few independent online publishers (like Hospital Records), and CDs. I pay for it because I don't want to feel used while listening to music, and I don't want to rely on ongoing permission to listen to something I've paid for explicitly. This is a different stage of the on-demand/streaming userbase, when they want to have a copy of a record which lasts longer than Spotify Inc.

stonogo 9y ago
Yeah, turns out language changes. The TRIPS agreement defines piracy in terms that have nothing to do with shivering timbers. As for "standardized rights", that kind of shit is what leads to taxes on media like blank CDs or, before them, cassette tape, and -- worst of all -- organizations like ASCAP getting royalty payments by default, whether they're entitled to them or not. Any effort to "standardize" rights management generally turns into a club with which entrenched interests beat down innovation or dissent. Just let them burn out with their shit business models; we don't need them anyway.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > Any effort to "standardize" rights management generally turns into a club with which entrenched interests beat down innovation or dissent. ...then don't license your rights in that format, are you thinking I'm saying the government of the United States should be responsible for determining the licensing terms of media? I'm just thinking that there could be some standardized package with official masters, metadata, and rates, which any old streaming provider could register for, download, reencode, and start sending the revenues their way. Beyond that, rights holders obviously retain the right to strike cheaper or higher-service deals with specific providers, or to stop licensing their content, just like before. I don't mean sell every TV show and movie at the same price, I don't mean forfeit your rights, I don't mean anything of the sort, I mean standardize the agreement format. > Just let them burn out with their shit business models; we don't need them anyway. But in the future, how will we access media from the on-demand age, or which is no longer available DRM-free?

Overtonwindow 9y ago

I am adamantly opposed to the MPAA in every way. The movie and television industries act more like a colluding monopoly than a business. The prices and costs have risen much too high out of greed, and by some strange quirk, they're using the legal and regulatory systems to gouge the public. This goes far beyond just pirating television shows. It's Comcast, net neutrality, set top boxes, and massive media conglomerates all rolled into one.

madengr 9y ago

I have an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. I use it for watching the original 26 years of Dr. Who; that’s it.

alistproducer2 9y ago

I would totally support micro-payments to content producers as opposed to the status quo. Until then.....Kodi all day baby! Cut the cord and never going back! I, however, didn't buy one pre-packaged. I did it the "hard" way and installed it on a Rpi3. If only I could play netflix on it, it would be perfect.

Crosseye_Jack 9y ago
You need the widevine lib but I was under the impression that recent builds of kodi could support Amazon Prime and Netflix content via plugins (valid accounts for both are obv needed) https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p Why, though? Isn't the Pi CPU the same family that's also in smartphones, where Netflix works even with the FHD (or Retina!) screens everyone and their dog puts in a smartphone?
  - Crosseye_Jack 9y ago
    It seems to be down to inputstream.adaptive which is the bridge between widevine and kodi. See all the decoding has to be done in software and atm inputstream.adaptive isn’t refined/optimised enough for lower end CPUs such as what powers the RPI. Remember that the rpi is designed to be cheap. The whole rpi3 board is sold for $35 which still makes a profit for the board manufacturers and the Raspberry Pi foundation. So “corners” had to be cut somewhere and using a less powerful CPU helps keep the cost down. Note: The devs believe they will be able to get 1080p widevine protect content to playback smoothly sooner or later, but as of the last time I looked at it, that belief is a best guess, I dunno if they have optimised the code yet or if they have changed their opinion of if/when it will be done.

omg_ketchup 9y ago

There's a massive gap between the pirate service and the "legitimate" media service. For one, you can just type something in, and get the movie you want. You don't have to navigate between 15 different services, and then find out the film is only available on mail-order DVD, or in other countries. For television, the networks are HORRIBLE about providing their content to cord-cutters. Want to watch the latest episode of Mr. Robot, which airs on Wednesday at 10pm? You're gonna have to wait AT LEAST until 9am on Thursday morning, WITH YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Or, you can pirate it for free. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said, but Piracy is not a payment issue, it's an access issue. Also, companies being greedy is a bad look. CBS hiding Star Trek behind their proprietary $10/month service is going to kill Star Trek, because the intended audience sees it as a bullshit cash grab. Put it on Hulu you greedy bastards.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
"not a payment issue, it's an access issue." ... "bullshit cash grab" So in other words, it's a payment issue? Let's say you watch $100/month for cable, and watch about 3 hours a day. That's over $3/hour. $10/month for 4 hours a TV is cheaper than cable, it's ad-free (I believe) and it's more convenient. It's expensive compared to Netflix or piracy, but it can certainly be argued it's not a cash grab.
- xzel 9y ago
  I don't think its fair to boil the two points he made into the same argument. He said too many services and timing issues and one thing about Star Trek. His second point is pretty specific to occurrence, companies taking their shows off 3rd party streaming services and putting them behind their own paywall. That is definitely a cash grab and its become more common, in my opinion.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    That's exactly my point. There are two issues: cost and access. The OP said "It's not a payment issue, it's an access issue." I say it's both.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

I wonder how these plugins actually works. With traditional pirate sites, the business model is usually clear cut: webistes get income from ads, uploaders get money from hosting services and the latter get the money from user buying their premium accounts. With torrents, there is some exchange, too - each downloader is a seeder. But in the case of plugins?

nickysielicki 9y ago
For live sports it's typically just scripts that extract media from the flash player sites like firstrow. They piggyback off the content from the ad-sustained websites, but without showing the ads. The sites like firstrow can't do anything about it because they are not actually hosting the streams themselves, they're just embedding players from various live streaming services. For movies, etc., my understanding is that it's P2P a la popcorntime.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  OK, so if it's P2P, wouldn't it actually make the plugin users liable for making copyrighted content available (in contrast to simply downloading the stream)?
  - nickysielicki 9y ago
    I did some digging and I think I was wrong above when I made that distinction about live and recorded content. P2P can be done for live sports via sopcast/acestream/etc, and (as far as I can tell) this seems more popular than the method I described above (eg: ripping content from live stream websites) for live sports, due to the quality difference. In addition, P2P addons for movies a la popcorntime do exist, but the biggest addons that I have heard of: Genesis and Exodus, just rip content from file host sites. But yes, if they're doing P2P, they're definitely liable to get letters. I think people overestimate the frequency of people getting caught for p2p file sharing, especially for live things that appear and disappear quickly.
octalmage 9y ago

nickysielicki 9y ago

Anyone else have fond memories of playing around with a modchipped original Xbox? I know I do. I think I still have that thing somewhere in a box, XECUTER3 and all. I don't think the article makes a big enough point about Kodi being rooted in XBMC, and XBMC being a project that started on the Xbox homebrew scene. Kodi's roots in XBMC are inherently tied to piracy, because every early developer and user had to chip their xbox, and they probably did that so that they could pirated games. That filters who is going to be contributing and using the project, so it's no surprise that movie and music piracy addons popped up with time when you consider that one of the first features of XBMC in the first place was being a launcher for pirated games. Don't get me wrong, XBMC always has had a legitimate and legal use case, and Kodi certainly has a legitimate and legal use today. But the roots of the project had to do with piracy and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the project attracted piracy addons and continues to.

octalmage 9y ago
I have very fond memories of those days. I remember the first time I saw the Linux boot loader after a successful exploit using Mech assault, my buddy and I high five'd. The project has obviously come along way since those days, and could probably not be as successful with Xbox in the name or with the stigma attached to it. Hence the rebrand. Their only chance at making it is to distance themselves as much as possible from the piracy. The reason it's attractive to (pirate) plugin developers is that it's cross platform (they've already figured out how to get it on AppleTV for example), and a generic enough API. You can write Python to hit a webpage, find a URL, and tell Kodi to play it. Kodi has also solved distribution (repositories) and auto updates. I get it.
electriclove 9y ago
I modded my original Xbox for XBMP/XBMC. I never played Xbox games on it though I did play emulated classics. Not sure if that is typical or not..
b3lvedere 9y ago
Very fond memories. Never thought it would be so (relatively) easy to hack wide open such a well protected system like the Xbox. It was so much fun and i learned a lot in the process about BIOSes and firmware. It also taught me that any device can be (ab)used to the max if you just have the right tools and knowledge. Some exploits are so amazingly easy. XBMC/Kodi is awesome. I bet there will be a lot of copy procjets if they ever try to lock it down.

jdhawk 9y ago

I'm sure all of these boxes come pre-configured with a VPN Service, but all the standard protocols can still be detected with Deep Packet Inspection, something I've seen AT&T do (and block) pretty effectively. I guess there area always the StealthVPN/Chameleon providers out there that try and mask the signature of "what" is going over the VPN - but enough of that and I'm sure they'll nix those connections as well.

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
DPI is a sham, most of those specialized HW (sold by pseudo IT security gurus) just assume that any VPN connection "is bad" and procced to block them, there is no way to detect a pattern on a (decently-configured) VPN, there is a reason China (the biggest investor on that this type of tech) is mandating Apple and Google to delete all the VPN apps on their stores.

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

Well most of my friend that have one those Kodi-boxes used to paid subscriptions for pirate-content IPTV providers for Roku but since Roku started to fightback and ban the most popular pirate content providers it was only matter of time before they find someone willing to sell them an alternative.

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

This fight will end with Kodi removing addon support on the next version and some fork taking over the work.

CaptSpify 9y ago

It drives me insane that we keep thinking that digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. It makes no sense to me that we think of distribution as "hard". Distribution is soooo easy, and it's effectively free. The only reason we have these gatekeepers in the way now (hbo, netflix, etc) is that we haven't figured out a way to fix our antiquated financial models. I don't see "piracy" as a problem, I see it as more efficient in our current situation.

kyle-rb 9y ago

>That ease applies to creating the piracy addons themselves. Since primarily all they do is find existing sites that host pirated content, grab working links, and present them in Kodi's user-friendly interface, Betzen rates the complexity about the same as creating a simple web page. This seems like an oversimplification. Most sites that host pirated content want you to watch that content within their website; so they can get their ad revenue and mine cryptocurrencies while you watch. They intentionally make it hard to get at their content, so in most cases, it's significantly harder than "creating a simple web page."