The misinformed battle between Kodi and rights holders may soon be over as Kodi consider adding DRM in an attempt to appease content owners. Kodi has gained a massive amount of users over the last few years, but they have also had to defend themselves due to the primary use often being to stream pirated content.
Kodi itself is just a platform, they do not control or develop the apps that people install, but the openness of their platform has left it wide open for app developers to create a network of pirated streaming services. This has led to a lot of confusion, and often blame is placed on the wrong people.
At present, some rights holders who seek to protect their content, are contacting Kodi directly and this is where the problem begins. Kodi does not control the apps or the content they show, and whilst Kodi does engage with rights holders questions, they also make it clear to them that they want to work with them to put an end to piracy on the platform.
The newest suggestion coming from the Kodi camp is to try to get rights holders to develop their own official apps and allow legal content streaming, just as they would on other platforms. There would, of course, be a cost to the end-user, but it certainly would be a good way to get legal content streaming to the millions of Kodi users.
Kodi does target sellers of ‘fully loaded’ packages, and they hope their active approach to tackling illegal streaming will help encourage rights holders to jump on board. With the availability of Kodi and the with a number of devices you are able to install it on, it is hoped that content owners will jump on board. It would certainly put an end to the somewhat questionable quality of streams.
Do you use Kodi? If official apps were available at a cost, would you install them?
How would that work? As long as anyone can develop plugins for KODI it will be possible to stream pirated content in some way. But they can’t “remove” plugins either, as they are one of the main draws of KODI.
If it wasn’t for the YouTube, Twitch, Zattoo and several other unofficial plugins, I wouldn’t even use KODI in the first place.
It would be a dark day indeed if they locked down “unofficial” plugins, so that everything would have to go through a time consuming procedure of being vetted and officially “blessed” – it would be more locked down than the platforms it runs on, seeing as you can run unofficial stuff from anywhere on Windows (or Android, after enabling other sources).
Maybe an option to “allow unsafe sources” and a warning somewhere it is at your own risk and without approval or support