Back in 2004/2005, I made a visit to my tech-savvy friends house to hang out on a Saturday afternoon. I was always up on all the latest tech but this guy was always a step ahead of me. I noticed he had this program on his TV that I had never seen before & asked him what it was I was looking at. That was the first time I had seen or heard of XBMC.
I was so enthralled by everything he showed me that I went to Game Stop that day to buy a used XBOX console. This was the first gaming console I had purchased since Super Nintendo in the early 90’s. I brought the XBOX back to his house so he could ‘mod the chip’ & set up XBMC on my newly purchased machine. In the following weeks I did a ton of reading up to further my knowledge of this program & came across web sites selling customization pieces to make the XBOX unique. I purchased a crystal clear case & threw in a 750GB hard drive & have been a loyal XBMC user ever since.
I eventually moved on to using XBMC on a Zotac Zbox ID34BR connected to a 4 bay HDD enclosure housing 15TB of media connected via USB, as well as Kodi on my Android phone, my Amazon Fire tablet, & my RaspberryPi in my bedroom. Anyone who came to my house always asked me what it was they were seeing on my TV & I didn’t mind because I loved telling people about Kodi.
Now that I got the story of my love affair with Kodi out of the way, I can get to the point of this topic. Someone, somehow needs to put an end to the absurd popularity of people using / selling Kodi on the Amazon Fire Stick or whatever other popular devices that are being used to stream illegal content. It is beyond ridiculous how many Fire Stick owners I overhear talking about Kodi & how they saw this movie that is still in the movie theater or watched that for free or this for free & are canceling their cable, etc. People that have been to my house on more than one occasion, who have seen Kodi on my TV & have asked me about it, I hear talking how they just bought an Amazon Fire stick with Kodi & how great it is. I ask them; “Don’t you remember seeing Kodi & asking me about it when you came to my house that time?” They had no idea it was the same thing. They are amazed when I tell them that Kodi has other uses besides streaming illegal content & how I have been using it for almost 15 years & it originated on the first XBOX. They didn’t even know that Kodi could be installed on other devices besides the stick, or on a computer for that matter.
I have a friend who sells the Kodi installed Amazon Fire sticks for $120. His sales pitch is telling people it is like an illegal cable box (if you guys remember, this was a big thing 20 or so years ago that you could buy to get all the cable channels). Anyway, he came over my place one night to hang out & we got to talking about the Fire Stick. I was never big on using add-ons, I especially have never installed any for the purpose of illegal streaming; not because I am I a strict law abiding citizen, but because I know the quality of the content & have no desire to watch someone in a movie theater recording the screen with a video camera. Anyway, after he talked & talked it up, I said he could install it while I ran out for a pack of smokes. I assumed that all he was going to do was install some sketchy add-on that I could easily uninstall if I didn’t like it. When I returned to my house to check out what everyone has been raving about lately, I came to find he totally wiped out my version of Kodi & replaced it with some other version bundled with all the illegal streaming add-ons. The home screen was a mess, icons and shit everywhere. All my settings were gone. All my sources gone. Everything. Apparently, he did not know you could just install these add-ons by themselves. Needless to say I was furious. I had to cool off with some Diablo 3 and my friends at d2forge.
After I calmed down, he was still trying to tell me how great & how much better his version of Kodi was than what I had & he started showing me these add-ons. One of them he couldn’t even get to launch. When he finally got one working, he pulled up content from an HBO link. I thought I was watching a 3rd generation VHS tape. This was followed by a broken link, then another broken link & so on. This is tarnishing the Kodi name & how great it is. I am worried that even though none of this is Kodi’s fault that eventually Kodi will be sued & shut down. I am not even exaggerating when I say how many people I know or hear talking about their Kodi installed Amazon Fire stick. It is extremely popular.
People think that Kodi / the Fire Stick / illegal streaming go hand-in-hand. I am sure the developers are troubled by this & I have read some articles concerning it on Kodi’s page but what is being done? They suggest informing people that the illegal streaming is done by 3rd party apps & not Kodi, but people look dumbfounded when I try explaining this.