Kodi Gaining Ground in North America

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Kodi, formerly Xbox Media Player, has been around since 2002, but has come a long ways since then. Kodi is an open source media player and has basically morphed into the one-stop-shop user interface for Home Theater PC (HTPC) users, not that you really need the "PC" part in your living room any more. However with the rise of inexpensive devices like the Mi Box Android TV (and lots of others) you can have Kodi up and running for less than $70. You can stop by your local Walmart and pick one up today! The rub with Kodi comes down to the "pirate" add-on community. Hundreds of TV add-ons exist, that are easy to install, and will give you access to a wealth of copyrighted content. Many folks use a VPN like Mullvad (advertiser plug) to encrypt their steaming data from prying eyes.

So is Kodi and its add-ons a big deal? It would seem so and the UK has started cracking down on streaming pirated content.

So how many folks are using devices loaded with Kodi? This report over at TorrentFreak spells out that almost 1 in 10 of North American households, out of 250,000 "surveyed," are using Kodi.

Overall Sandvine estimates that 8.8% of the households with Internet access across North America have an active Kodi device. This translates to several millions of households and many more potential users.

But Kodi in its native form does nothing illegal.

“Kodi simply serves as a front end; If Kodi disappeared tomorrow, then all of the content made available through the unofficial Add-ons would quickly be made be accessible via a web browser, or by another media player, and the parties that are benefitting today, would continue to profit,” they add.

It looks as if 68% of Kodi users are using it for streaming unlicensed content.
 
Been using Kodi since probably '03-'04 and haven't stopped using it (XBMC on chipped Xboxes)... I don't do any streaming or have any plugins on it though. I load everything from network shares. I have 3 boxes in the house, all working off a single MySQL instance.
 
Color me 32%.

Long time kodi/xbmc user on my htpc, at least since Microsoft did away with Media Center.

Closest I have to unlicensed content is my media rips. All done in the 12 months it was legal to do so in the UK, obviously. /s
 
kodi is just a media player.
I guess the UK figured out that it can't crack down on pirate streaming sites because they exist outside their legislative reach, so they instead targeted the users of it.
I guess that gets kodi in the news more, but honestly it's silly to think that only kodi can be used to access the streaming stuff.
 
I love Kodi, but it is still a bit of a pain to set up with other programs / streaming services. If it could serve as a front end or aggregator of sorts to be able to watch multiple legal streaming sites (with input streams / unified navigation) it would be amazing!
 
I know a few non technical people that got it to watch tv and movies, and they had no idea it was using pirated content. One was a gorilla box or something as I recall. They wouldn't believe that something they bought on amazon would be accessing illegal content, "if it was illegal amazon would have been shut down by now!" It's gotten so user friendly that the non techies are using and just assume everything is on the up and up, or simply couldn't care less.
 
These Kodi boxes are equivalent to, say, the Western Digital media player STB's from years past then........?
 
i love kodi and it multiple uses as of late i have been using to watch movies on my cellphone at work. i literally have 7 calls all of Saturday and no tickets to work on. At home its how i stream my rips from my main rig but havent really watched anything the last couple months.
 
It's almost as if you read between the lines I think [H] wants to you run to Walmart and then pick up your copy of Mullvad....

This will be an interesting fight, that's for sure. The end users are the only ones they can go after because Kodi isn't selling a product, so it would be difficult to attempt to force them to filter content. I'm not really sure where all of the bandwidth is coming from to make this work though, even if it's coming from other countries it seems like they really aren't getting anything out of this either.

If Kodi does become more prevalent maybe it will finally be enough to push video to go down the route that audio did. It's not that people aren't willing to pay money for the service they are getting from Kodi (I'd guess a lot of people who are using would actually pay some money for it) it's that no equivalent exists at present. A one stop shop to get any media you want, in a very convenient way. Obviously price is the biggest factor in this, as the content providers want as much money as possible, and it will only be after enough of their content is being used for free they will be willing to negotiate something that both sides will be happy with.

I have an Amazon music sub, and I can basically type in any song I can think of, and it's generally in there. It doesn't matter if it's new, old, or even lesser known. There is more than enough content there to keep me entertained. Amazon's Prime video is anything but that, you have a small selection and just about any movie that I want to watch, requires me to pay a rental fee.

Until things like Kodi even out what the content providers think that it's worth what the market will bear, we won't see a complete streaming service. Right now enough people are still paying the high prices so it's not showing up on the companies bottom line. It's more cost effective to chase potential buyers away and try to hit them with lawsuits to deter people from paying for their overpriced content. Once they start losing money they will quickly change their tune to try to keep profits high.
 
It does seem to be much bigger in the UK. Seems like I'm always reading stories about the UK authorities cracking down on it. Seems like the large plugin packages (like the Beast and such) are mostly geared for the UK, too.
 
I have a firewall, I have a VPN on it and all internal address that might have kodi on them go out through the VPN. End of story.
 
I have kodi on a rasperrbypi but only use it as a tv media player (does not download anything through it)
 
I have a couple of android media boxes - each with Kodi on them. Also for playing local media off my NAS box.

If (somehow) kodi went away, it would make no difference to me since that extensive video library would still be playable by any competent video player app.

I think these guys should be more worried about all the browser-based video streaming sites out there. You don't need Kodi or its plugins to use them.
 
If providers would stop bundling their liscensed content with 95% fluff that consumers don't need and make it an easy add-on that can be bought/canceled without contracts, then this would be a huge non-issue.
 
cyberguyz said:
I think these guys should be more worried about all the browser-based video streaming sites out there. You don't need Kodi or its plugins to use them.
Click to expand...

Kodi just compiles a ton of them (well, at least it can via plug-in packs) and offers a GUI front-end. I don't know if most people even realize that.
 
Once again, Media companies are missing the point.

People dont pirate because is free, they do it because the pirates are offering a better service.

Examples, unskipable ads in dvds, dont allowing fast forward or rewind on video streams, artificial scarcity, etc.
 
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Hielo_loco said:
I love Kodi, but it is still a bit of a pain to set up with other programs / streaming services. If it could serve as a front end or aggregator of sorts to be able to watch multiple legal streaming sites (with input streams / unified navigation) it would be amazing!
Click to expand...
nilepez said:
Emulator? What's it emulate?

FWIW, I use it, but I've never streamed anything with it (unless you count the time I tried using it to play back music from my file server ;))
Click to expand...

Beta build has emulators ranging from 2600 - Dreamcast.
 
I've been using it since the early days of XBMC, but what made it great was the advent of Indigo and not having to hunt down 3rd party add ons. I use several 3rd party plug-in's including;

Kodi/Plex plug-in (great)
2 Movies Involved (ok)
Crackler (ok when it works)
Crackle2 (so-so)
321Movies (getting rid of it)
Kodi Popcorn Time (great)
PlayThis (getting rid of it)

I use way more than this, but most of the 3rd party plug-in's are utter shit and has me going thru my list once a month to clean out the non working ones, that and my wife and kids are guilty of installing a shit ton of useless plug-in's that causes a massive clusterfuck, I have since then made them their own profiles.
 
Catboxer said:
Been using it since XBMP days of Xbox 1. I have dabbled in the streaming addons, but they suck. Way too much upkeep to make them work. I simply stream my local content.
Click to expand...

Same here. I use it on a rpi with an external drive when we travel to watch movies. Works great and plays everything you throw at it.

grtitan said:
People dont pirate because is free, they do it because the pirates are offering a better service.
Click to expand...

They pirate it because it's there and they can.

What the media giants are missing the point on is if it wasn't there users still wouldn't go out and pay for it because it's mostly crap.
 
I have three active Kodi boxes in my house. None of them have ever been used for unlicensed streaming.

I use them as front ends for MythTV as well as playing my ripped BluRay collection from my NAS.

I'm also not happy with the little sticks perfformance in Kodi. I build x86 boxes.

My main Livingroom HT box has an i5-4570T and a GeForce 720GT

The master bed room and guest room have identical Celeron G1840's and GeForce 720 GT's

If a single slot half height GT1030 comes up, I may get three of them to upgrade the HTPC's to HEVC decode capability, but at 30W TDP its a more powerful card than I need just for videos. I wish they'd make a GT1020 under 20W TDP
 
Jailer said:
Curious Zarathustra[H] what performance issues have you run into with "little sticks"? My Rpi2 performs flawlessly and fast with Kodi.
Click to expand...

You know I shouldn't have said performance. I'm too tired. The main reason I haven't used them is because I don't believe there is a MythTV frontend plugin for ARM. That is a must have feature in my house. All live TV in our house comes in via MythTV. I don't care for live TV but I'm not the only person in the house

The performance comment was more directed at Intel's integrated GPU's. My MythTV frontend always crashes when using Intel GPU's and AMD GPU's. Rock solid on Nvidia GPU's though.

I'm very happy with the GT720's, only thing I'm missing is HEVC decode capability.
 
I was going to turn a Raspberry Pi 3 into a kodi-plex client, however I'm thinking about going with the Nvidia Shield TV instead with kodi-plex (SPMC). It's more polished on the user interface and can play 4k video. However, you have to switch back to 1080p whenever you're playing 1080p content if you want to use the better upscaler found in your TV.
 
i'm not a fan of spending $100/month on cable tv and only watching 5-6 channels vs the 300 channels they bundle on me. i'm not committed to watching shows at a specific time and i dont dvr either. give another yr or two and it'll slap cable providers in the face of why they're losing ground on cable tv. i cut the cord and been on kodi since and can honestly say i'm happy saving money and being able to watch what i want when time permits.

"Better Ingredients. Better Pizza. Papa John's."......wait whut???
 
I used to use it. It would always leak memory and after a couple of days I would need to restart my HTPC. This persisted for years. I eventually dropped it and went to plex.
 
Youn said:
I have kodi on a rasperrbypi but only use it as a tv media player (does not download anything through it)
Click to expand...

Yeah I have one that I use when we travel that I hook up in the hotel rooms. But my content is on USB drives.

At home I use Plex on Roku's (and a PS4)
 
grtitan said:
Once again, Media companies are missing the point.

People dont pirate because is free, they do it because the pirates are offering a better service.

Examples, unskipable ads in dvds, dont allowing fast forward or rewind on bideo streams, artificial scarcity, etc.
Click to expand...
This is exactly it. I cut the chord because the user experience was superior, not because it's free. In fact, I pay to get my content.
 
Blown 89 said:
This is exactly it. I cut the chord because the user experience was superior, not because it's free. In fact, I pay to get my content.
Click to expand...
Exactly, sadly, they dont get it and per someone previous response, some people either.
 
Blown 89 said:
This is exactly it. I cut the chord because the user experience was superior, not because it's free. In fact, I pay to get my content.
Click to expand...

I would too, but my fiancee still feels a need to have live TV for some reason, so we keep it.

The financial incentive to do so isn't there though. I ran the numbers a while back, and it would actuator cost me MORE to go all streaming and IPTV, because of the stupid bundling packages.

It used to be that roughly half your bill was internet and roughly half was TV, and if you got more than one service you got a slight discount on the total.

Now, if I cancel my TV service I lose my bundle, and wind up saving only $3 or so per month. The mix of streaming services and purchasing of content to replace it would cost MUCH more than $3 per month.

IMHO we need a Glass Steagall / Volker type rule to apply to separate ISP's from TV providers, because the practice of the same color panties providing both services is WAY too large of a conflict of interest.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I would too, but my fiancee still feels a need to have live TV for some reason, so we keep it.
The financial incentive to do so isn't there though. I ran the numbers a while back, and it would actuator cost me MORE to go all streaming and IPTV, because of the stupid bundling packages.
It used to be that roughly half your bill was internet and roughly half was TV, and if you got more than one service you got a slight discount on the total.
Now, if I cancel my TV service I lose my bundle, and wind up saving only $3 or so per month. The mix of streaming services and purchasing of content to replace it would cost MUCH more than $3 per month.
IMHO we need a Glass Steagall / Volker type rule to apply to separate ISP's from TV providers, because the practice of the same color panties providing both services is WAY too large of a conflict of interest.
Click to expand...

I think what we need is a company that owns the pipe and then companies that sell internet access (and probably the same should be true for video services). In TX they do that for electricity, and my bill is way cheaper than most places, plus I have endless plan options (which is not all good, as it's a PITA to go through them all). I just reupped for a year with a plan where electricity is free from 8PM to 6AM. I'm not 100% sure I'll save over my old plan 9which had a slightly lower price/kwh, but I believe the vast majority of my AC is used at night.
 
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