The End of TVAddons: Kodi devs are dropping like flies (historical reference)

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.

TVAddons vs Kodi devs

Why is this a big deal?

TVAddons site taken downWhat 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.

TV Addons website just before the end...

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!

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22 Comments

  1. TVA was the Walmart of streaming, one stop shop. (my wife works at WM so I won’t bash any further) But everything in one place isn’t always better. Things build and grow and eventually get out of hand: Napster, Pirate Bay, etc. It’s all good, we prune the bushes and new pretty things will grow. The bottom line for me is, I dumped DirecTV a couple of years ago because I was tired of getting hosed. $120.00 a month for 220 channels of which 10 we watched. With SlingTV and a couple of good movie/TV show connections, we’ll never go back. I always found TVA to be too bloaty for my needs. Lots of options these days, we shall see what rises from the ashes…..Kodi isn’t dead, nor going anywhere, TVA was an umbrella, it got turned inside out by a storm….go get a new umbrella.

  2. Fredfredfred3says:

    Well, if no-one else says it, i will. I’d like to personally and wholeheartedly say a massive thanks to the team at tvaddons who have kept me entertained for the last few years. Hats off to you guys. Yeah, sure there are heaps of other addons out there, but the thing that made tvaddons addon so good was the simplicity of it. To make something popular and easy to use, see if your gran can figure out how to use it with minimal instructions. That’s what tvaddons was. An elegant piece of software that even a numpty like me could use. Keep coding guys!

  3. If they didn’t gouge people with there high prices maybe people would stay with the cable and sat company’s and maybe they need to restructure themselves.and lower there prices.

    1. Kennedy Parkersays:

      They are trying to make a profit through distributing greedy networks content when it comes to TV. Plus the consolidation of who owns who made them even more greedy. It is bad enough that we are getting robbed in the improvement category by insanely high price tags with other fees strapped on.

  4. John and Kennedy hit the proverbial bulls-eye. I dislike using the word “greed” though, because I don’t know how many cents out of a dollar goes into our price for overhead by the cable companies. But the bottom line is the bottom line for both business AND consumers. Once the novelty wears off and the introductory prices go away, the end user determines the cost against the service and convenience. If it no longer represents a value then changes begin to take place. This coupled with rising end user costs for the same, now represents a real liability. So to us, whether the monthly bill represents greed for the cable companies or not, matters not. The content value it represents to me is not worth the price paid. But what about “convenience?”. I know that company (X) has devoted a lot of effort in bringing this convenience to the customer(s). Tell a remote control what you want, and voila!! How much is that worth? I’m sure it cost a lot of money to bring all this technology to the forefront. The big cable companies can show us a scroll itemized list of what it cost, I bet. But in consideration of the whole enchilada, if it no longer represents a value, no matter the cost bared by Mr. Big Cable Guys, well, we are…and have been….seeing, hearing, and reading the outcries of many that this service no longer represents a value. Everybody cares only about their own pocket, and it works both on the business side, and the consumer side. If a business can no longer maintain a profit margin, it’s time to pull in the reins, or change the way they do business in light of the current times. Seems to me that the *value* has shifted to alternative viewing, it certainly has for me. The so-called “introductory price” of cable no longer cuts it, or should I say “why yes it does”, the cord….that is.

    1. Hi Bill. I’ll agree with most of what you say but challenge part of it. You’re absolutely right that the business model needs to change. The only way that’s going to happen is when enough f their subscribers cancel their cable subscriptions and sign up for some alternate service. I say “sign up for an alternative” because if we resort to large-scale piracy, then we’re not showing the cable companies that we want a better system, we’re only showing them that we don’t want to pay anything for our TV.

      If that happens, they can claim the moral high ground and the legal high ground. They’ll be justified in going after people like TVAddons, and eventually, the individual person who’s using them to stream content. We can complain all we want about high prices and whether or not the “”should”” be that high, but the fact is millions of people still pay those prices.

      There has to be a middle ground between paying hundreds for your cable bill each month and outright piracy. Finding it is where we will win the war.

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