[da-anda]

with the rise of popularity of kodi, and lets face it its because of the 3rd party addons, its increased the sales of minx, nvidia shield, weetek ect, if you removed that option i should imagine it would have an affect on their sales and maybe affect your sponsership?. im not arguing i dont even use the addons its just an observation on why so many people are buying the devices

We don't care if it affects their sales or the fact if they sponsor us or not. In fact, if the one and only reason to sponsor was to increase their sales, then we won't care if they dont renew the sponsorship. And believe it or not, we get many sponsorship offers where we clearly see they want to do it for the wrong reason and we decline their offer. So it's really not about the money.

And here some clarification for all the youtubers and other conspiracy people. We don't fight third party add-ons - people are free to create, use and sell them, just don't promote them using our Kodi brand. Create your own "piracy free tv brand". Also, the second you offer/sell versions of Kodi with preinstalled add-ons (it doesn't matter if these are from official repository or "third party" !!!!), you're not allowed to do this using our Kodi brand and you have to rebrand. Follw the rules and you're usually fine.

And again, we don't fight the existence of third party add-ons as everybody is free to do what he wants to, just keep our name away from the piracy ones. If the piracy add-ons would be native Android apps (which would be totally doable as the streams would play perfectly fine with the default Android video player), they also wouldn't advertise Android as THE source for free movies. The apps would have names and these would be advertised, not the OS.

As for "streaming is legal". You might not get sued for streaming, but you're still streaming pirated content that violates copyright and whatever. It has a reason why the servers where these streams are hosted on are either off shore or in a country that doesn't care about the law. So you still think streaming such content is the right thing to do, regardless if you can be sued for it or not? We don't think so and thus dont want to be associated with such actions. And again, we're not fighting third party add-ons in general, there are many out there that are fine, all we ask for is to keep our name out of anything related to the add-ons dealing with piracy. If you don't understand the reason behind this, let your mother explain it to you.