Tag: alliance

Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi addons

An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi addon scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha , who are responsible for the development and hosting of addons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down. The action comes after The_Alpha reportedly received a hand delivered letter to their UK home : “This letter is addressed to you by companies of the six-major United States film studios represented by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), namely Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Disney Enterprises, Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLLP and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Netflix, Inc. and Amazon Studios LLC (represented by MPA via the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)), Sky UK Limited, and The Football Association Premier League Limited, ” the opening paragraph reads. The letter identifies the developer as the creator of third-party software that provides “unlawful access to protected copyright works, including works owned by, or exclusively licensed to, the Content Companies” and notes their additional involvement in the upkeep of the Colossus repository, an online collection of various streaming Kodi addons. With Colossus gone, a popular TV show and movie streaming tool called Covenant is also currently unavailable. It’s scared a number of related addon developers, with Ares Wizard, another popular host, reportedly deciding to throw in the towel. The crackdown suggests the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has a thorough understanding of how owners of so-called “Kodi boxes” are able to stream TV shows and films illegally. While Colossus merely hosts the tools, urlresolver and metahandler did much of the heavy lifting for streamers. Their job was to scrape video hosting sites for relevant streaming links and serve them up for tools like Covenant inside Kodi. Streamers will find it very difficult to find working video streams of their favorite content without them, but they could reappear via a new host in the future. Sorry to say but I am stopping all development of the urlresolver, metahandler, and my other addons. I am not responsible for covenant and bennu but colossus has agreed to delete the repo too. — jsergio123 (@jsergio123) November 15, 2017 As pre-loaded Kodi boxes have surged in popularity in the past year, many of the most popular piracy-linked addons have targeted by rightsholders. In June, US satellite broadcaster Dish Network issued a lawsuit that targeted the TVAddons repository and forced streaming tools ZemTV and Phoenix offline. The action will be bad news for Kodi, the the company behind the popular media center. Despite attempts to distance itself from piracy, it often finds itself implicated in news reports that focus on actions taken against infringing third-party addons. Via: TorrentFreak , TVAddons

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Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi addons

WiGig will bring superfast WiFi to devices next year

The WiFi Alliance has finally certified ” WiGig , ” a high-speed, 60 GHz standard otherwise known as 802.11ad. Using beamforming, it can yield speeds of up to 8 Gbps, or nearly 1GB per second from a distance of up to 10 meters. As many as 180 million devices using the standard, like routers, laptops and smartphones will arrive by the end of next year, the group said. It also unveiled the first five certified WiGig products from Intel, Dell and Qualcomm, among others. The WiFi Alliance notes that the new standard operates in the “less congested” 60 GHz spectrum, which should aid speeds. It says that manufacturers can implement “handoff” technology so that your phone and router will automatically switch to 2.4 or 5 GHz WiFi if you leave the room, for instance. Samsung, among others, has already released uncertified WiGig devices. 8 Gbps is around three times faster than the best 802.11ac routers can do right now. However, in the real world, most current devices can only hit 600 Mbps or so, less than a fifth of the theoretical maximum in some cases. In theory, 802.11ad should be faster, thanks to the beamforming and distance limitation, but you’ve essentially got to be in the same room as the router to benefit from such speeds. Of course, your smartphone or laptop would have to support the standard too, not just the router. Qualcomm’s WiGig video from CES 2016 Nevertheless, if the new standard can do even 20 percent of the promised speeds, it’ll be useful in a lot of cases. If you usually work from the same room and transfer files around your network, for instance, you’ll no longer need a wired gigabit connection. And folks with Google Fiber or other high-speed internet services should get faster wireless speeds — my router and smartphone combination limits me to 200 Mbps, for instance, while my laptop gets 1 Gbps via wired ethernet. The first mobile device to carry the standard is the Dell Latitude E7450/70, and both Intel and Qualcomm have certified router solutions. Expect a flood of devices to carry the standard soon, including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. By next year, many will probably factor the standard into their “buy” decisions. Source: WiFi Alliance

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WiGig will bring superfast WiFi to devices next year