How the Kodi Box Took Over Piracy
wired.com
wired.com
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...
You're right that it isn't strictly "stingy", but wanting something you've been denied isn't a good reason to take it.
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.)
And it is definitely easier to see movies that have been pirated.
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.
I just have a passion for protecting parts of football by regulation. Not every sport is about TV rights.
Yes. It is precisely what I said it was.
The existing market wasn't being responsive to the wants and needs of their customers so the underground market sprung up to meet those needs.
It's not that people aren't willing to pay for these things, it's that they want to have a convenient way of doing so.
John Q Customer is not going to pay for Cable+Internet, Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access, Amazon Prime and HBO Go.
Media company green caused this.
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.
...
"bullshit cash grab"
So in other words, it's a payment issue?
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.
"You don't have to navigate between 15 different services"
I pay for Netflix, Prime, and Hulu -- I won't pay for CBS because there are already enough services.
Just don't think that justifies pirating whatever you want.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
And yet those are the very services being pirated ^h^h^h excuse me, whose revenue models are being bypassed.
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.
Are they though? Only 2 out of 49 million HBO subscribers are HBO Now users. And Americans still pirate HBO content in large numbers.
People are canceling $100/month revenue cable plans and getting $10 netflix. That's a large loss of revenue.
It's not clear to me that streaming can actually support the television ecosystem we have now.
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.
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.
Why would a HBO subscriber be a HBO Now user? Now costs money; HBO subscribers can use HBO Go for free.
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?
Considering that Wired is a legacy media (Condé Nast) publication, it's not inconceivable.
Edit: For clarification - I'm not saying it's impossible. I just personally can't see any obvious beneficiary. Would welcome any suggestions though.
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.
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.
If we reduce Kodi to piracy related use cases, we might as well throw in VLC.
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.
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.
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.
These families had no idea what torrents are, but were using pirated content basically every day and streaming it a la netflix.
It is the future of piracy for sure. I suspect it is many many times larger in scope that torrents are currently.
(BTW I do not have one of these.)
> 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.
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.
Stop thinking of it as paying for a physical product, and start thinking of it as a tip jar for making more stuff in the future.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If they go down in flames, serves them right.
One of the reasons I've not bought a DVD in years and mainly stream shows now.
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]
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 don't see "piracy" as a problem, I see it as more efficient in our current situation.
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.
https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix
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?
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?!
Who designed this crap?
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).
And... Jeez. What utter amount of bullsh.t and wasted money... everyone with a bluray drive and a copy of AnyDVD HD can create a perfect untraceable backup anyway so why do the studios insist on making the experience for Netflix users as bad as possible?!
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.
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."
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.
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.
For movies, etc., my understanding is that it's P2P a la popcorntime.
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.