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http://www.tvaddons.ag/iptv-streaming-warning/What's the deal with this?
Enough is enough! It seems that there has been a recent influx of fly-by-night live streaming add-ons, most of which have labelled themselves as IPTV add-ons, giving the word IPTV itself a bad name. At this point, it is our responsibility to strongly warn against the use of these add-ons, which could likely land the end user as well as the administrator in major legal heat. It is common practice for these add-ons to start out as free add-ons in order to promote themselves to unsuspecting users, you should beware of the intentions of these developers and ask at our forums should you be unsure.
Before we get started, we should mention that there are a lot of good add-ons available through our site, add-on library and forums. There’s a reason that we don’t allow certain add-ons, and that reason is the protection of our user base. It’s important to realize that while an end-user might just want the instant gratification of a live sports stream for a few bucks, he or she doesn’t realize that paying for that type of stream could end up landing them in jail or fined for thousands of dollars. These types of paid streaming add-ons also bring a lot of unwanted heat to our community because it’s highly illegal to charge someone for intellectual property you don’t own.
The first issue surrounding these add-ons is the reliability of their streams and the technical abilities of the people running said streams. Sure it might be easy to get a high quality stream running when you only have ten users, but as soon as your add-on becomes popular based on the word of mouth promotion of these early adopters their streams just stop working. This is because they don’t have the proper technical infrastructure to provide streams to the masses in the first place, nor the ability to secure these streams from take down requests by rightsholders.
The second issue is in regards to privacy protection. In many cases, they are using home-based servers to broadcast their streams, which are easily traceable and don’t have the protections in place in order to ensure that their users won’t be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Just the idea of hosting an illegal sports stream in the United States demonstrates a clear disregard for user privacy.
The third issue surrounds those add-ons that charge users to access their service. Most of these developers are taking payments by PayPal and other easily traceable payment methods, which is totally insane. These payment services will give up all information on anyone who sent or received money from the accounts associated, providing the authorities with proof of your illegal actions. It’s not only irresponsible of these services, but just plain dumb to accept payments via these methods.
The fourth issue is the intentions of the developers of these type of addons. Unless they are totally out to lunch, they should realize that their business model isn’t at scalable one from the get-go. They are promising users the world, and know from the beginning that they can’t deliver. So basically they are just taking money and running once they hit the limit of how many users they can support, which isn’t very many in the first place, and surely not enough to earn any real income from. We’ve literally seen dozens of add-ons like this open and then close within a few weeks, or a month or two; it’s starting to become a thorn in our community’s user base.
While it might be a little bit of a hassle trying to find reliable sports streams through Kodi at the moment, you should remember that some things just aren’t necessarily meant to be easy and free at the same time. These type of streams are legally enforced much stronger than any other type of stream, and it is for that reason that they’re highly unreliable. If you’re looking to watch football or hockey, or whatever reliably, you might as well pay a few bucks to get it from a legitimate source, instead of paying some fly-by-night that’s going to run and hide with your money, after landing you personally in legal trouble.
That being said, we’re working very hard to try to bring free and reliable live streaming add-ons to the community, we’ll be writing an article soon about how we recommend you go about doing so, stay tuned.
