[Gombeek]

just to make it clear, our foundation is not making any deals or contracts with anybody. No movie industrie, no other business. Do we try to contact some companies/websites? Sure, but the goal is to convince them to create official add-ons or give permission to create community ones. No deals, no money, nothing, just introducing the project and ask. Yet again, we're no business and have no business interests, but we still want to provide the best media center for free as we believe in open source and user freedom. If we didn't believe in that, none of us would donate his sparetime to the project.

Going to CES and having meetings with interest parties is 1 thing, having a booth representing your brand would be another.

@goombek - from which money should we pay for a CES booth? Unless some company offers us a spot on their booth I really doubt we could afford one in any way. The donations we get are just about enough to do a yearly developer conference.

Ill spot the booth. There, it's out there... I've tried numerous times to sponsor Kodi to no avail, you want me to put my money where my mouth is, there it is, now everyone can see it. Ball is in your court Kodi.


Ive been thinking a lot about this discussion and I was going to bow out after Nate's response but dammit I love your software and I don't want to see it go away because of all this 3rd party crap and the bad rap Kodi is getting because of it.

Nate you say I'm just making up numbers... first off I did say "estimate" so I'm not really making up anything but we can do this scientifically. I polled a random sample of 30 people who used XBMC on apple tv's, 29 of those 30 used XBMC primarily for 3rd party add ons, now i really don't want to pull out my statistics book and show my math and explain how a bell curve works, so before anyone decides to challenge how statistics work please research this method online first. Anyways so with those poll results i can say with 98.5% certainty that (and I'm going to low ball this so i fit well within the range) 90% of all XBMC users on the apple tv we using it for 3rd party add ons.

Now I also polled a random sample of 10 high end home theatre companies who use Kodi with their projects in clients homes. All 10 responded they use HTPC as android doesnt have the performance their clients expect as they are using Kodi for its media centre rather than the 3rd party applications. a 10 sample size gives me a much lower certainty level but i can still say I am 95% certain 98% of all home theatre professionals use Kodi on HTPC.

Now for Android, I won't mention who the box manufacturer i spoke with yesterday was as I don't represent them or their interests but in no uncertain terms did they say "the only reason people buy android is to watch free tv". So leading back to my suggestion of killing the android build as it is the easy solution, yeah i get why you don't want to, I get you shouldn't have to surrender any ground, I get its total bs that people associate piracy with kodi, i also get this would cause a issue with your sponsor Nvidia if you killed the android version. But in respect to the cutting off your nose to spite your face comment... its not to spite you face, a better example would be to say its like cutting off your nose which is plagued with cancer to save your face. Again I get that some people use the legitimate features on android, there is always 2 sides to every story, and there is always the anomalies when you talk about bell curves and statistics. The issue is using the anomalies or the vast minority as your defence against the majority, firefox doesn't have this issue as the majority is legitimate users. Now I'm not reiterating that this is what Kodi should do or that it is the only solution, i am simply defending my statement.

Like mentioned before another solution is to get behind a big marketing campaign and promote the use of Kodi for its legitimate features. Get in bed with some companies and make add ons for them or get them to contribute add ons to kodi. Make it alluring to legitimate companies. Ill spell it out, its very simple, you go to a tv channel or studio and tell them hey, people are using our software, its out there, you're already losing market share like crazy and you're looking for new avenues to survive because lets face it, cable is a dying medium, make a subscription based add-on for our software, we push it out via our official repo and it will be in the hands of X number of millions of people over night on a plethora of devices. I was at a wedding in Mexico last month and one of the other guests was the marketing manager for a popular tv channel, I suggested this exact solution to her as they are losing ground, her response was "well we're working on a iPhone app"... bottom line i don't work for Kodi, i don't have access to your statistics, user base, etc, so thats where my involvement in that conversation ended. But the idea is to get enough legitimate value added add ons for Kodi that out weigh the 3rd party add ons popularity.

Now to address the box sellers on amazon, eBay, and local classifieds... I totally get your trademark, and how box manufacturers should be shut down if they violate it. But how do you enforce a trademark on a used product. What I'm saying is apple couldn't stop the sales of jail broken devices on eBay, and trust me i know they tried, because the devices were not being sold as New from a licensed Apple dealer, they were being sold as used and as long as you could provide eBay with a copy of your legitimate receipt (or often it was paypal you had to give the proof to) then all was good. People once they own a product are allowed to modify it as they see fit and sell it used should they want to. So that being said the guys selling fire sticks or the plethora of other devices technically used and loaded, this is a unwinnable battle as it stands right now.

Again i want to stress this is In My Humble Opinion which i sign off all my posts on this topic. But the problem really needs to be addressed at its core and while the truth is something that may be hard to swallow, it is necessary to face in order to over come it. Now should anyone disagree with anything I've written or my opinion, you are well within your rights to do so and I completely respect it, but no personal attacks please.

IMHO