"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.
As being known as "the computer geek" in my local I am often asked if I supply "Kodi Boxes" (I Don't). In my experience of the people who ask it's a bit of column A (wanting free Sky Sports), a bit of column B (wanting games that are not shown live in the UK) and a bit of column C (Wanting movies and other on-demand tv content).
I have an 3rd Gen Apple TV and the thing is as slow as fuck to stream movies. Also, Apple TV doesn't immediately put out movies for rent, as fast as it does for buying.
I just want to rent the fucking movies. Not buy them. There's no more brick and mortar video rental stores in my area.
They just make it more enticing to pirate the movie since it's probably easier. (Not that I actually do.)
It isn't even just renting. You can't get movies before they are spoiled unless you pay a fortune to see them in an inconvenient location filled with ads, and criminal markup on popcorn.
And it is definitely easier to see movies that have been pirated.
I'm pretty sure "they" in this case are the studios, not Apple, but yeah, this sucks. They want us to spend a lot of money on a movie we're going to watch once, or we have to wait weeks or even months to rent it for much cheaper.
"The Premier League and Sky maintain that, while grey market viewing of games is not illegal on the part of the viewer, it is illegal for anyone (such as a public house) to make such services openly available. This has in the past lead to heavy fines for public houses in the United Kingdom which have shown 3pm games in their establishments."
The FA Laws have this regulation for a reason. To see a football match between 2:45pm and 5:15pm, go to one of them! Live! It is much more fun and entertaining the TV, with 91[1] clubs in the football league and many more football matches in non-League. It is easy and cheap to see a live football match. It not all about the Premiership.
Without supporting the lower league clubs, the top teams, do do have the talent coming through. It is easy to see the next top-player out on loan for less than £15 per match. There are many, many, in League one or two (Div 3&4) in old money or non-league within short distance - heck even walking distance from most placing the country.
This is a good regulation that protects the game. Don't let Sky/Murddock dictate what football is or is not.
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?
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.
Hey, I just want to thank for a book recommendation of yours I picked up in another thread. Didn't find any other way of contacting you, so here we are. Scattered Minds: this book has just changed my life. Thank you so much, kind internet stranger.
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.
> 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.
Interestingly, that seems to be US (and I think Canada) only. The rest of us get the new episode on Netflix every Monday. The new one should be ready by now.
Of course, if I want to actually watch it in 1080p I still have to resort to piracy, because Netflix doesn't want to offer anything over 720p if you use a free operating system and browser even if you have the HD-and-two-screens subscription. The reason they don't really give but hint at is that the DRM available on free software isn't good enough, and I might be tempted to go and upload the 1080p video on some pirate site. So to watch it in 1080p I have to go to a pirate site and get it there, where it's already available (of course). Makes sense.
I actually went to sign up for the CBS thing via Apple TV and was greeted with a ridiculous privacy policy saying something along the lines of they reserve the right to sell all my personal data to third parties.
You're better off downloading in that case.
The other CBS shows also look painfully bad (Little Sheldon?) - so I probably dodged a bullet anyway.
I'm not a big fan of comcast, but their x1 boxes do a pretty good job of aggregating content and giving it to you wherever it comes from. They have a deep on demand selection and include netflix access, if you use netflix.
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.
I already pay for CBS channels. I'm not paying them more for one show. They don't get to double-dip. I'd be happy to see any and all single-provider streaming services fail, and be forced onto some better-supported streaming service.
Not to mention that I'd have to buy another device to actually play their content on my TV; the blu-ray player supports Amazon, Netflix, and a few other big providers, but apparently not CBS. It's less about the cost of the device, and more about not wanting yet another little box under my TV that I need to worry about software updates and such for.
Content isn't fungible. Netflix, Prime, and Hulu put together may have more content than you could ever watch (arguably, even just one of them alone does), but if it doesn't have the show or movie you want, you're boned.
I've had Netflix, Prime, and HBO for years. A couple months ago my gf and I really wanted to watch The Handmaid's Tale, which is only available on Hulu. Hulu charges $12/mo for their no-ad plan (hell if I'm going to pay for a service and still have to suffer through ads). The idea of paying $12/mo for a single show seemed a bit much to me... in the end I signed up for the free trial to watch it because I couldn't find pirated copies on Usenet.
Now Star Trek Discovery has just come out, and CBS wants me to give them $10/mo for the privilege of watching it. No thanks.
It's funny, because we've all jumped at the chance to "cut the cord" and ditch our cable subscriptions, but we've replaced it with the online version of exactly the same thing. We still don't have a la carte pricing for TV shows and movies for the most part. At this point I might be paying more per month than I used to for cable.
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.
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.
> On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues.
And yet those same rights-holders seem hell-bent on squandering the opportunity they were given, by splintering their offerings among their own pay services instead of offering them multiple places. I already pay for Netflix. I'm considering paying for Hulu. But there's no way I'm going to pay Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Google, CBS, HBO, Showtime, etc., etc., et-frigging-cetera just to get access to content I care marginally less and less about. (Sorry, CBS, I'm not paying your monthly fee just for Star Trek Discovery no matter how much you think that show is worth it.)
You have the content. People want the content. Offer it on your own services if you really feel that degree of vanity about it, but also offer it on enough other major services that any mix of two or three has one that has your stuff on it. You'll make more money, they'll make more money, and I'll get to watch everything I want.
> [...] but also offer it on enough other major services that any mix of two or three has one that has your stuff on it. You'll make more money, they'll make more money, and I'll get to watch everything I want.
I think the prevailing theory is that exclusivity and opaque per-provider contracts actually make more money. I am not sure if it is true or not, but as long as the content creators believe it is and the providers cower to them, there will be no transparency and there will be little cross-provider access.
The comment about the language is important and, in my opinion, often overlooked. We can joke about how no one pirating "Modern Family" has ever made anyone "walk the plank", but the fact is this language lets the media paint anyone who downloads content without paying (often, they cannot pay) as someone deserving of harsh punishment. Like it or not, the criminality of the pirates of the high seas is being associated with anyone that visits a Bittorrent tracker and downloads some content. In the eyes of many, "hiding" behind a VPN service only compounds this criminality.
I think microcolonel is making an important point: it's all hyperbole and in almost all cases, there is no injured party. Certainly I am not arguing that it is right, or without a moral gray area. But it's certainly not on the same level as physical theft.
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.
> 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?
> People are canceling $100/month revenue cable plans and getting $10 Netflix. That's a large loss of revenue.
But we can't pretend that that revenue is still up for grabs. The moment people are aware of the true market value of a copy of one episode of Game of Thrones, the price they're willing to pay for the convenience of watching it anywhere is going to be lower than the cost of cable. The upshot could be that what money they do end up paying is allocated almost directly to what they're actually watching, rather than a thousand channels of garbage they would never be caught dead watching.
The people who are cutting the cable can do one of three things: 1) watch it on-demand, 2) don't watch it, or 3) watch it without licensing it. If you don't have a convenient means of watching it at a price which satisfies consumers, consumers can only really justify doing 2 or 3 (which basically means you'll go out of business). That's what I mean by recovering revenues. If you don't do on-demand and paid downloads right, then you will have no revenue once all the cables are cut.
> It's not clear to me that streaming can actually support the television ecosystem we have now.
It's not clear to me either, though we must keep in mind that a) that revenue is going to dry up no matter what, and b) more direct licensing, and viewership-based licensing will make the entertainment industry more lean, and fewer shows will be basically money laundering schemes.
>>But we can't pretend that that revenue is still up for grabs.
Exactly.
Just because your service no longer enjoys the massive margins it once does doesn't make it unviable, or dead. Learn to adapt. Not everyone can, or will, but these companies were not and are not entitled to huge fees, prices, and margins - just like the rest of us.
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?
Agreed, for the longest time, I'd been using Kodi on HTPC to access my lan content with a decent UX but at the same time wanted Amazon video and Netflix support, not to mention Hulu and the like. Now I use an NVidia Shield TV with Kodi as an app, but still wish it was the other way around.
I also hope that Android TV integration for VLC gets better, there are a few things for SMB/CIFS shares that require you hookup a mouse to get through.
I'd be shocked if the number of "legitimate" Kodi users is even close to the number of those using it to obtain whatever TV/movie content they are interested in not having to pay for.
Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) in the UK commissioned a report claiming as much as a million of them have been sold in the UK alone - while I'd take that number with a large pinch of salt given the source, It's pretty clear these things are being sold preconfigured for piracy in substantial numbers in the UK. Several cases concerning individuals have found the individual sellers to have had revenues well in excess of £100,000.
To be clear, I'm in no way advocating banning Kodi just because it has the potential for questionable use, but I think it's also silly to feel frustrated that people only talk about what is probably its most common use case: watching content you haven’t paid for.
While that may be true it's a rather recent development that the devs over at Kodi certainly don't enjoy. Kodi or XBOX media center / XBMC as it was known has been around since the early (original) XBOX days. It powered my home theater for years, long before it was sold as a piracy box.
If we reduce Kodi to piracy related use cases, we might as well throw in VLC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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?
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.
So you're saying that, basically, Netflix is leaving the whole hardware acceleration capabilities of any mobile SoC and most recent-ish desktop/laptop chipset on the table and does basically its own decoding from crypted bitstream to framebuffer?!
Sorry if I worded it badly, I didn't mean to imply that all Widewine content is decoded in software on all platforms, just that's the way its handled on Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi.
Now i'm not a widevine "Partner" just a person with too much time on my hands and an interest in DRM. So for anyone who works on kodi or who is reading who is a widevine partner who's NDA's prevent you from correcting please forgive any mistakes. This is just my understanding of Widevine.
As I understand it on Android/ChromeOS widevine can decrypt and decode in hardware but I believe its done via a HAL.
As far as I understand it there are 3 security levels to widevine Level1 being the highest and 3 being the lowest.
Level 1 is where the decrypt and decode are all done within a trusted execution environment (As far as I understand it Google work with chipset vendors such as broadcom, qualcomm, etc to implement this) and then sent directly to the screen.
Level 2 is where widevine decrypts the content within the TEE and passes the content back to the application for decoding which could then be decoded with hardware or software.
Level 3 (I believe) is where widevine decrypts and decodes the content within the lib itself (it can use a hardware cryptographic engine but the rpi doesn't have one).
Android/ChromeOS support either Level1 or Level3 depending on the hardware and Chrome on desktops only seems to support Level 3. Kodi is using the browser implementation (at least when kodi is not running on Android) of widevine which seems to only support Level 3 (So decrypt & decode in software) and therefore can not support hardware decoding. But that doesn't mean that hardware decoding of widevine protected content can not be supported on any mobile SoC. Sorry if I gave that impression.
When a license for media is requested the security level it will be decrypted/decoded with is also sent and the returned license will restrict the widevine CDM to that security level.
I believe NetFlix only support Level 1 and Level 3, which is why for a while the max resolution you could get watching NetFlix on chrome in a desktop browser was 720p as I believe that was the max resolution NetFlix offered at Level 3 and we had to use Edge/IE(iirc) to watch at 1080p as it used a different DRM system (PlayReady) and why atm Desktop 4k Netflix is only currently supported on Edge using (iirc) Intel gen7+ processors and NVidia Pascal GPUs (I don't know if AMD support PlayReady 3.0 on their GPUs as I don't have one so not really had the desire to investigate, I'm guessing that current Ryzen CPUs do not as they currently don't have integrated GPUs).
On Android where Netflix's app believed Level 1 was supported it would request a Level 1 license and then Widevine would then pass the content off to the TEE for decryption and decode which would then use hardware for decoding. If it didn't believe that Level 1 was supported it would fallback to Level 3 which is why some Android tablets had to run a modified NetFlix app to force Level 1 requests because the official app wasn't tested on that device and was put on the supported devices list even though it did support Level 1 (running the modified app on a device that didn't support Level 1 wouldn't result in playback).
Each episode of G O T is 3.00 on youtube. Or you can buy the whole season for $20 HBO GO is $15 per month and you can watch more than one season. This is clearly way too high a price. In theory, google should compete with HBO GO and lower their price.
Don't the rights holders for these shows set the price and not Google? (The Price per episode is the same as if you buy the episodes on Amazon Video)
Also on YouTube you are "Buying" the episode / season so you can watch it anytime you want, with HBO Go if you stop paying the subscription you lose access to the content.
Google are granting permanent (to all intents and purposes) ownership of the content to view, whereas a month does not cover time to watch all the episodes of a new season, and goes away the second you stop subscribing, and allows the content to be downloaded. Your theory is comparing apples and oranges.
In practice people usually watch an episode once or twice. They lose access if they lose the account, they do not own the episode. Additionally, Google could compete and make a monthly streaming service too, which they don't except for live tv. Why aren't they competing with a streaming service? Because they have Google Play.
What, in practice people are burned out by twice-to-thrice-a-generation format changes. I have a bunch of TV series in DVD boxes and now have no DVD player.
>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."
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?
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.
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)?
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.
They're ripping from sites that are ad supported. So the site doesn't get the ad impressions, and the plugin developer could (if they put ads in the plugins). Site operators hate it, and are constantly blocking them.
Basically, they reach out to about 80 sites and scrape for links, then resolve those. It's a pretty insane process, but they've got it working just well enough.
Better to make some money from the people watching your streams on a computer without an adblocker, than it is to hide the stream and have people hit their back button and find one of the dozens of other sites.
The cost to run one of those sites is being overestimated here. They don't actually serve any of the video streams, just embedding from the dozens and dozens of little-known free live streaming services.
Well there are subscription based "pirate content" providers, most of them are listed (even with reviews) on reddit.com/r/IPTV/ and almost all of them work as a Kodi-Addon and even some have on-deman high-quality content.
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.
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...