You can feel the panic in the Kodi community.
TVAddons suddenly disappeared this week after being sued by Dish Network for copyright infringement. Each infringement carries a possible fine of $150,000 US.
That can add up VERY quickly.
Since the “Kodi Crackdown” started, several big-name Kodi devs have thrown in the towel under legal pressure, but losing TVAddons is by far the biggest blow to the community.
Why is this a big deal?
What makes TVAddons so special?
Their website was one of the most popular Kodi sites on the Internet. Their repository held over 1,500 add-ons from many Kodi devs and almost 40 million users registered with the site.
No more.
The site went dark earlier this week.
Their Facebook page was deleted. Their YouTube page was stripped of all the content. Their Twitter feed has been silent.
Every video they made, every question that was answered, every comment, forum post, every tutorial….
Gone.
The DailyMail is reporting that the owners of the site have cut a deal with Dish TV to avoid prosecution as long as they cease supporting any illegal addons and help with further investigations.
No love from Team Kodi
Once the news hit, I swear I heard champagne corks popping from the direction of Team Kodi members.
There’s never been any love between Team Kodi and the Kodi devs at TVAddons. Even though they use the same platform, they’ve always seemed to be at odds with each other.
Team Kodi, the people who actually develop and support the media center itself, have always maintained that all they do is provide an open-source media center. They don’t provide any content, but they do provide the framework for other developers, usually called Kodi Devs to make their own customization for Kodi.
The Kodi Devs at TVAddons (and many other sites) create add-ons (small programs) that access specific content. Some of it is perfectly legal. There are addons for YouTube, CBC, SyFy, CW, and many, many other content providers. But there are others that are….legally questionable at best.
And that’s the basic problem.
Kodi wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is today without the Kodi devs creating add-ons to get access to paid content for free.
It isn’t legal, but most people don’t care as long as they’re getting something for free that they’d normally be paying hundreds of dollars a month for.
Could Team Kodi have stopped these illegal add-ons?
Definitely.
But as Nate Thomas, said in an official post on Kodi.tv, “We are developers and not the police, and we have no interest in acting as police for our own software. Kodi will remain as free and as open as it always has. Feel free to continue using Kodi however you want.”
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TVAddons break their silence
After days of silence which fueled rumors of legal take-downs, the owners of TVAddons sent out a ten-page letter to the Kodi devs that had addons hosted on their repository.
KodiTips.com posted a description of the contents of the letter, which included technical specs and commentary on how the site plans to relaunch in the future. Hint: it won’t be anything like it was. Remember when Napster tried to go legit after it ran into legal trouble?
But KodiTips also posted a one-page introduction. I think there are some interesting points to it, so I’ve included it below. You can find their original article by clicking here.
Dear Developer:
No one likes to read a ten (page) letter, I know that. I really spent a lot of time writing this, and truly care about our community. I hope that for that reason you will take the information in here seriously, because even the most advanced developers make mistakes in regards to their privacy.
I’m not going to comment anything from last week, but will note that pretty much everything you’ll read online (including the TorrentFreak article) are highly sensationalized and spread all kinds of incorrect information.
As for the future, it’s important for us all to ensure that everyone is in compliance with the law. That means that you can’t publicize any time of specific content titles anywhere. It would also be nice to see people come up with fun and unique add-on names.
We are unable to associate with anything to do with direct linking, and strongly discourage you all from associating with those who do. Playlist add-ons are basically the same thing as running your own Primewire site, definitely not a good idea.
I’m personally looking very forward to seeing new legitimate add-on development, some of the most popular add-ons are legitimate ones, think FilmOn and USTVNOW, and there are definitely more sources to be found.
In closing, I’d like to assure everyone that TV ADDONS is not going anywhere, moving forward things are going to be more efficient, stronger, and more peaceful. Thank you all for supporting our community for so long, much love to all of you.
Sincerely,
Eleazar Coding
Picking apart the TVAddons letter to their Kodi Devs
I’m an analyst by trade, so it’s my job to pick things apart and find the little nuggets of useful information in them.
So that’s what I’m going to do here.
“It’s important for us all to ensure that everyone is in compliance with the law”: Well…that is what most business entities will do. And make no mistake, TVAddons is a business. They’re not doing all this for free. They make a lot of money off of their developers, their web traffic (you), and the advertisers that pay good money to get your eyeballs on their products.
They specifically mention that there are things that won’t be tolerated on the next version of TVAddons, whatever that may be. These include “publicize any time of specific content titles anywhere”, which basically means that developers can’t advertise that they’re going to give users free access to PPV channels or events,. This also applies to getting free movies that are still in the theatres.
But here’s what most people would miss about this letter that I found interesting.
They made a couple of very innocent comments that give some hints about the direction they’re going in the future:
- “It would also be nice to see people come up with fun and unique add-on names.” : This could be something innocent, or their way of telling their Kodi devs to come up with unique names that don’t scream out to everyone (including the authorities) that they’re getting paid content for free. “Tim’s Addon” won’t attract as much attention as “Free UCF PPV” would, after all.
- “even the most advanced developers make mistakes in regards to their privacy.” : Take every precaution to protect yourself, because if you get caught, so will we.
- “I’m personally looking very forward to seeing new legitimate add-on development”: This SCREAMS out to me that they knew what they were doing was wrong. No matter what side of the legal and ethical argument you’re on, if the owners of TVAddons themselves aren’t calling their addons “legitimate”, then you know there’s a problem.
Here’s the most laughable part to me…
“I’d like to assure everyone that TV ADDONS is not going anywhere.”
Does anyone actually believe that?
Well…evidently somebody does.
KodiTips got it wrong
I’m going to be decidedly un-Canadian right now and call it like I see it:
The two commentary articles from KodiTips are complete and utter nonsense.
Worse, they are deliberately trying to tell you that everything is just peachy TVAddons when you don’t have to be a genius to see that everything is DECIDEDLY NOT OK.
Their original post tried (and failed) to make excuses why TVAddons went dark at exactly the same time as the legal troubles began. The second post, which included the letter, ignored all of the facts and just focused on the spin that TVAddons wants everyone to believe.
To be fair, KodiTips makes one good point: the tvaddons.ag domain has not been seized by the authorities. It went dark on its own – and the same goes for their Facebook, and YouTube accounts.
But here’s where they lose me: “The idea of this post is to set the record straight on reports from Torrent Freak and Cordcutters News who have claimed that the TVAddons website being offline is related to any legal action.”
Are you serious?
As you may have guessed, I have a website myself. (shocking, I know). So I will tell you from experience, when my website was down for half a day I did everything in my power to get it back up and running. I installed a backup on a completely different server so my followers would know I didn’t disappear.
TVAddons didn’t. There are other possibilities, sure. But the simplest answer is that they were scared and took the site down.
OK.. let’s give them the benefit of the doubt (even though they don’t deserve it)
Wouldn’t you say something on your Facebook page, or Twitter feed, or YouTube if you were having technical issues?
Let’s see what KodiTips had to say about that:
“Worth noting, the TVA Facebook group is also offline right now. Pure speculation, but we know that TVAddons is a private company that values security highly. They may have decided that Facebook did not suit their needs and vision moving forward.”
Again…are you serious?
Facebook…the world’s largest social media platform…didn’t suit their needs moving forward.
I’m throwing the BS flag on that one.
KodiTips, and even the letter from “Eleazar Coding” above, accused TorrentFreak of “sensationalizing” their article about the demise of TVAddons.
Make no mistake: TVAddons is dead…at least in its current form.
So what’s next?
What does this mean for the Kodi community?
Here’s what this means for you.
If you are trying to install a new addon from the TVAddons repository…
It won’t work.
The repo is gone.
There’s no place to install it from.
Basically, if you’ve got the repo already set up on your Kodi box, it’s just pointing to an empty server that has been turned off.
If you’ve already got your addons installed…
They may work for a while, depending on how they get their streams. But they’re not long for this world.
Sooner or later the streams are going to change. With no servers to tell your Kodi box where to go, you’ll be left pointing at the old stream that doesn’t work anymore.
Something will always take its place
If you’ve relied on TVAddons, this may seem like the end.
In fact, a lot of news sites are posting headlines like “Another nail in the coffin for Kodi”, “Kodi users despair”, and “The end for Kodi?”
Here’s where I’ll agree with “Eleazar Coding”. Those are sensationalist, click-bait titles.
Piracy sites have always been around and will always be around. Let’s not kid ourselves here. TVAddons was a piracy site. It may not have hosted any streams themselves, but they brought piracy to the masses…about 40 million of the masses.
Something will rise to take its place.
Before TVAddons, there was Pirate Bay. Before Pirate Bay, there was Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, Megaupload, Kickass Torrents, and many, many more.
Does this change anything?
Sure.
Does it stop anything?
Nope.
If you’re ready to throw in the towel…
It seems like everyone is getting on the streaming bandwagon these days. Cable companies and content providers have seen the writing on the wall that they need to change their business model.
Many of them already have. Most are still going to charge you something to watch their content. But it’s going to be a fraction of what your cable bill is each month.
If you want to learn more about what streaming options are available, check out my article on finding the best streaming service.
What do you think about TVaddons shutting down? What will you do next?
Leave a comment below and let us know!
Remember when Napster went down and you could not download what the Hollywood establishment thought was copy writed?? Well you can still download any movie tv show etc etc etc. The same here! Somebody else will take tv addons place in a heartbeat and things will continue as they should. Freedom of the internet!
Like I said, something else will take it’s place. It’s going to be harder for the novice users though.
NONE OF THE CABLE COMPANY’S OR SATELLITE COMPANY’S CAN SUE U IF THEY ARE NOT IN BUSINESS , START WORKING TO GET PEOPLE OFF OF THE CORPORATE TIT , AND WE CAN FRY THEIR COMPANY’S IN THEIR WALLETS, PUT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS , NO CUSTOMERS NO BUSINESS , AIR WAVES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FREE , SO IS THE INTERNET
Whoah. You might want to cut back on the coffee this early in the morning.
There’s one major flaw in your post (other than the all-caps): If nobody pays for television, then nobody will produce television programs. “Air-waves” are free, yes. But the content that is on them certainly isn’t. That’s why even in the old days, you had tons of commercials during your show. The advertisers paid for the content by marketing to you, the viewer.
I disagree! We could get free TV again and better, but we have to shove the right size nail into the Providers wallets. Right now we are being double billed. How so, Cable was introduced to lower the amount of commercial interruptions to just between shows for a cost. Now we pay for regular free TV. Ya for being dumber than a box of rocks majority. The way to do the best cord cut is supporting legal services that drop the dumb commercials that cost less. Look for alternatives. Make them want us instead of us wanting them. Even if you have to go to the old free C-band and play to ping two or more satellites to get the free channels. Then educate others on how, cost, and difficulties you ran into. We will always have premium channels, but many greedy regular ones will drop the greed to boost the numbers that the advertisers pay for.
You keep calling them Kodi Devs when in fact they’re not developers of Kodi; instead they’re just Kodi Addon Devs – there’s a huge difference between working on the Kodi software and throwing together a Python script.
Kevin, I agree with you to a point. The Kodi user community considers addon devs to be Kodi Devs. That’s where I made the distinction between Team Kodi and Kodi Devs. TVAddons went out of their way to call to their addon devs as “Kodi Devs” – even though they only worked on addons.
Is it right? No. But is it what everyone already calls them? Yes.
Is there another provider that’s still going g with multiple add ons you can install live TV add ons
This is just going to weed out the lazy people who don’t want to learn anything. The addons are slowly coming back on new servers. TVAddons itself, I don’t know if it will be back. There is a good chance that they cut a deal with Dish to shut down and make the lawsuit go away. The addons will scatter to smaller repos on overseas servers. The dependencies will likely go to GitHub. Nothing will be all stored in the same place again.
This is similar to what happened after the crackdown on satellite piracy years ago. That never went away either, it just wasn’t mainstream anymore. Most people will be too lazy to search for the scattered addons and their related dependencies so Kodi will go back to what it used to be, software for the home theatre geeks. You can’t buy those awful pre-loaded boxes from Amazon anymore. That’s what ruined everything. The home theatre enthusiasts generally use PC’s and Raspberry Pi’s. If you know what you are doing, you can get everything without addons anyways. The average person isn’t going to be bothered with all of this and it will go back to being a hobby like it used to be. If it isn’t wide-spread mainstream piracy, Dish and the other media companies may just leave it alone.
Tim I suppose at some point I could get tired of thanking you for posts like this one but I don’t see any reason why I should (stop, that is). You’ve a reputation for industry insight, and candor; this post is no exception. Kudos for giving us not only a heads-up to the topic but the whole 9 yards; who-what-when-where and (arguably, most significantly) WHY.
You continue to give me no reason to unsubscribe…
George