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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

Can someone comment on what is the business model of those who set up streaming servers for Kodi etc. ? Bandwidth is expensive , why would you pay for it just to give it away for free ?

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Kodi itself is just the new name for XBMC (XBox Media Center). It's an open source media centre project, and they are in no way affiliated with any of this.

"fully loaded kodi boxes" are just set top boxes pre-loaded with kodi and a number of plugin that make it convenient to access pirate streams or download content in a style reminiscent of popcorn time. Since These guys are basically just bundling Kodi and some plugins on cheap hardware, they make a quick buck selling that. The torrents and streams are just there anyway, so it's not a cost they need to concern themselves with.

The question was: who is hosting the streams, and how do they make money?

Mostly unrelated streaming websites which work on ads. Community members build addons to access videos from those sites directly on kodi.

I think there are sites that just focus on doing that for creating ad revenue. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of the Kodi plugins for sports scrape the /r/{insert-league/sport-here}streams subreddits for the stream links.

There's are many shady streaming sites that are designed to be accessed through a web browser where they serve up ads and malware. There are also quite a few file locker services where people put streaming media, same idea. Then there are aggregators that index all this content. The Kodi plugins basically scrape both the aggregators and the file hosts and bypass all of their ads.

Aren't they torrents?

The news article mentions Premier league and other TV networks . I am guessing that these kodi boxes are being used to consume live TV content or TV shows. A day's worth of shows in high resoution could consume upwards of 4GB. Why would anyone seed that ?

i seed about that much per hour...not using the bandwidth for anything else so no reason not to.

I guess you only need one person to do it, and then all of the consumer Kodi boxes will also be seeding.

Does live(ish) bittorrent streaming work?

Yes, it does. Most popular bit-torrent p2p streaming solution now is Acestream. You can check it yourself.

http://arenavision.in/ http://torrent-tv.ru/channels.php

However, I doubt that 'fully loaded' Kodi boxes uses it, most likely it use simple m3u streams harvested from internets.

I didn't know acestream was p2p. I think I may have used it one or twice. Very cool.

If they're hooked into a BitTorrent client, aren't they seeding as well?

No--streams, I believe. (As in, video served from a web server)

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