[Dweber85rc]

In my country April's Fool is highly cultivated. And honestly i like almost every try to trick me. Even when the joke is poor, i value the attempt. The person tried to make me laugh. And that in itself feels positive to me.This years Kodi's April Fools joke didn't make me laugh at all. I even couldn't put just the smallest smile on my face. Instead i was shocked, felt miserable and dissapointed at the same time. Did they lost their mind? Did all the amazing volunteers are working their asses off to throw their mighty project right into the drain?What happened?This spring I treated myself on brand new stereo set. We were redecorating our living room and i decided to invest some serious money on the best AVR set with new audio boxes, Oled screen, you name it.When i started looking for a new set i talked to several audio specialist. In every conversation i explained the outline of my house and my love for Kodi. Most specialist were aware of what Kodi is, but looked at me with a sight like "are we living in the same century?". Those people who's daily job is in the video/audio industry declared Kodi half dead. Asking for a reason they all answered something like: Kodi is associated with illegal content. Authors don't like Kodi. Hardware producers are ignoring it, because they want to connect toNow the world is moving to a system which is dominated by content based platforms like Netflix, Disney, Tidal, Spotify, Soundcloud and the sooner the later most parts of Google like YouTube. If Kodi can't connect to those services, you'll get stuck.Kodi is about freedom. About the love we have for creations, movies, pictures, stories, information. Everything that makes life so beautiful. Things we made ourself. Things that are made by artists.So stop being nonchelant over author's rights. Embrace them and incorporate them into the mighty platform Kodi is. If you manage to succeed, the hardware producers are  in line to beg you to let them run Kodi on their systems. Just because you realised the integrators are always winning. We don't want apps for A, B, C, D, E until Z. We want one shiny, customizable portal to all content.Thank you and keep up the amazing work!Before you take your sword and sabel me down… above is just my personal opinion, meant to open discussion about Kodi's direction, not to criticize Kodi or anyone involved. I just think that 'jokes' about author rights, access to content is not helping the Kodi project.

X2.  I was pretty disappointed.  I too love kodi and while I understand that by being open source they can't really control who make plugins for illegal content, embracing the legal content would be wonderful.  I will not knowingly using illegal content and am more than happy to pay for it.  I would love to have kodi be my one stop shop for everything but their lack of desire to incorporate with the big boys legally, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Disney Movies Anywhere etc... at this point means I can't ever have a one stop shop for all of my legal content.

[DarrenHill]

The blocking point isn't on our side, it's on the provider side.

They want exclusive control over things (as can be seen by them all now bringing out their own services to try and get the dollar that way), and while the corporations insist on controlling everything then there won't be any progress.

It is disappointing I agree, however unfortunately there isn't much we can do about it (April Fool jokes aside).

[ozkhan1]

I don’t think there ever will be one shiny customizable portal for all your content as well as paid subscriptions, which offers all the best features (DRM, high quality AV)

I have been striving for that holy grail myself for years but reached the conclusion it’s best to keep subscription based services and personal content (kodi) separate. Yes, you have to deal with two boxes and all but the direction content creators and services are heading, they are always going to be in a tug of war with each other let alone play nice with Kodi.