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posted by mrpg on Saturday May 06 2017, @03:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-if-I-live-in-Australia dept.

Kodi, previously known as XBMC or Xbox Media Center, is being used "fully loaded" with add-ons (such as TVAddons.ag) by millions of households in North America:

New data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that close to 9 percent of all North American households have at least one Kodi device. Roughly two thirds of these actively use pirate add-ons, which is good for millions of families in total.

[...] Sandvine analyzed a dataset from multiple North America tier one fixed-line provider, which covers over 250,000 anonymized households throughout North America. Using this data, it was able to estimate how many households actively use at least one Kodi device. "The Kodi application itself does not generate much data, but it is easy to detect within a household due to its 'heartbeat' traffic which can easily be identified," Sandvine reports.

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. [...] Looking at the various traffic sources for the streaming data, including file-hosts, the company determined that 68.6% of the households with Kodi devices also use unofficial, or "pirate" add-ons.

Meanwhile, UK tabloids are running stories (tall tales?) about Kodi:

You know a technology's gone mainstream when the tabloids start yelling about it. This year the Sun, the Mirror, the Express, and the Daily Star have run splashes ranging from "Kodi Crackdown" through "Kodi Killers" to "Kodi TOTAL BAN!". It's not that they've stumbled on an underground hack scene; the stories have been briefed by copyright owners and law enforcement agencies.

[...] Illicit use of Kodi has reached a point where the UK government's Intellectual Property Office issued a "Call for Views," which closed in April, to find out how law enforcement agencies were dealing with infringing use. They use the term "IPTV," but also refer specifically to Kodi. No conclusions have yet been published, but three basic enforcement approaches are possible: shutting down suppliers of boxes, cutting off illegal streams, and going after end users.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday May 06 2017, @06:37PM (1 child)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday May 06 2017, @06:37PM (#505501) Homepage

    I wouldn't watch American cable TV even if they offered it to me for free -- in fact, they'd have to pay me to watch it. The intellectual level of the programming has become so sub-retarded that it's painful to sit through.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:11PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:11PM (#505809)

    The intellectual level of the programming has become so sub-retarded that it's painful to sit through.

    Even stupid, yet entertaining, content is simply obsolete. In 2001 if you wanted to see hot, underdressed women, you could tune in Survivor, but super-casual stuff like that has been replaced by various subreddits on the omnipresent phone. Why even bother with the TV... As for stupid entertaining comedy style content there's youtube.

    For me the problem with TV is the propaganda level, accelerated too far beyond cultural escape velocity to be relevant or interesting. Around the turn of the century, a TV show like Survivor was a dumb game show for women in bikinis which has wide appeal to at least 50% of the population, and the purpose of the show has shifted over time such that a typical segment now is three gays talking about outing a trans person, WTF is this?