The problem comes because people sell boxes preloaded with Kodi and plugins that make one-click piracy possible.
Unfortunately the association that people make is now "Kodi = Piracy", which is very wrong.
Kodi is a fantastic piece of software and it's a shame that their brand is being tarnished but c'est la vie when that's the biggest practical use case for your program. There's no sense for anyone other than the XBMC foundation to fight the river on this one.
What I would do if I was the project lead:
- Pick a new name or go back to XBMC since it still has plenty of mindshare.
- Implement a proper store for plug-ins and require signing for them to run a la Firefox.
- Let users sideload plug-ins by running in 'unbranded mode' and aggressively litigate people using your trademark for unlocked devices.
- Partner with manufacturers for an authorized device part of your store.
- Work with content providers to add official apps to your store a la Chromecast.
I don't think Plex will ever be a huge company but you don't need to be in order to succeed.
I find plex to be quite buggy and opaque. It is tolerable for the few things that it does, but that's mostly because it's a niche, and there isn't that much competition in this space. I don't know how emby is doing these days.
>trying to expand with features
Their expansion efforts are also not that scalable, again because they can't control content. They recently added integration with tuner boxes and dvr, but that whole segment is on its way out. Not to mention, various other issues with the inability to handle DRM and other copyright restrictions that come with cable. They also tried some cloud drive integration, which again didn't pan out, because they don't control the storage. I think they've tried to bundle some news and podcasts, which is marginal at best. In this space, I just don't see how you can make money unless you are selling content, storage or compute. Plex sells none of these. At the end of the day, it's some glue software that probably calls ffmpeg to transcode.
This requires enormous amounts of time and money that the XBMC foundation doesn't have.
Why is that association so wrong ? I mean, I would rather people fight fundamental issues like censorship on sales platforms for arbitrary reasons, instead of trying to sugarcoat it with stuff like, "yes, but it's only OSS software". For one, other than music, there is no real mass-market way to download DRM free popular media. Ripping your own DVDS/Blu-rays doesn't count, because that's still piracy (according to the US anyway). So instead of fighting the battle on whether this is piracy, and this isn't piracy, why not just say fuck it, and fight for the right to make and sell whatever device you want to and do whatever the fuck you want to with it.
yes i'm implying winamp is piracy.