[kuluba]

Thinking about the ever increasing amount of media sources and streaming providers and stores, i was wondering if the old approach of selecting your addon for a certain provider is still the best idea.

My friends and family do not care if a movie is on amazon, disney or netflix. They do not care if the live tv is feed from DVB-S or a fallback stream from SimpleIPTV, Zattoo, Waipu or a tv station specific plugin.
They do not care if the movie comes from the ARD Plugin, The more generalized Mediathekview-Plugin that scraped public tv stations in germany.
Same goes for radio stations and so on.
It doesn't matter which store offers the movie or tv series they want to buy/rent for the night.

I think it would be time to specify a list of properties for media sources that addons can supply and creates a common media library out of it.
A common search across different media providers with filters would certainly increase usability.

Thinking about my itunes and google movies account and amazon, a more unified shop would also be a good future idea. If you search through the media library and the only result of your search is outside of your flatrate , it would be great if you just click add to my library and continue watching after the trailer convinced you.

Yes this is a lot of work, but having to know where the item is that you are intrested in becomes more and more difficult.

[PatK]

If you could get all the content media providers together in some sort of aggregated app, all would be fine in the cosmos. If you take the view that the whole Internet is the app, then all is good, it's all in the details. Apple + Disney + Netflix + Amazon + YouTube + Indie  and their lawyers should sit down with the Kodi team and acknowledge how Kodi rules the universe as long as they play by our rules.  Humm... is something wrong in this statement?

It doesn't matter which store offers the movie or tv series they want to buy/rent for the night.

Your family doesn't care for all this as long as you pay the bills for what they want. Sounds like an app called 'daddy on demand'.

Yes this is a lot of work

Roll up your sleeves, you're part of the problem or part of the solution?

[kuluba]

Not everyone making suggestions and talking about issues is capable of fixing it on his/her own and you don't have to be.

[DarrenHill]

The problem is most of the content providers and copyright owners don't want it fixed - they want direct control of their own media distribution and the income from it.

As can clearly be seen by all the new subscription services that have sprung up recently and the general fragmentation of the whole media supply market.

When they're doing that, the last thing they will want are to have official addons or similar here tying everything together again, or indeed in some cases even unofficial ones which can access the content.

[LongMan]

Media Import.

What's this all about?
The general idea is to provide a framework to be able to import media items from all kinds of services and locations which are not supported by our current library scanners which are purely filesystem based. Examples are importing some or all items from a plugin or from a UPnP server. This will allow users to directly integrate these items into their usual library so when they go through their library they'll also see items that are not directly available as a file on their disks/NAS but are available through another service and can play them like any other library item (as long as the service is available).

[kuluba]

The problem is most of the content providers and copyright owners don't want it fixed - they want direct control of their own media distribution and the income from it.

As can clearly be seen by all the new subscription services that have sprung up recently and the general fragmentation of the whole media supply market.

When they're doing that, the last thing they will want are to have official addons or similar here tying everything together again, or indeed in some cases even unofficial ones which can access the content.

What they want is kind of irrelevant.  All they should care about is, do we have a valid subscription or not?.
As long as Widevine is used and not worked around and Data saved and freed from DRM, there is nothing wrong with a kodi plugin. They don't have to do it themselfes, just tolerate it´as it causes no harm.

[DarrenHill]

Unfortunately it's not irrelevant. If we do something and they don't like it, all they need to do is issue a cease and desist order and we have to stop or else things can get legally nasty.

It has happened a few times, and given the current climate will probably happen again as things go. Most do tolerate, but not everyone does and they are under no obligation to do so.

[jjd-uk]

What they want is kind of irrelevant.  All they should care about is, do we have a valid subscription or not?.

Ha...ha...how naive.

The big media companies do not view themselves as content providers but experience providers. They want you using their UI so they have complete control over the end to end experience thus they hope if they do a good job you are less likely to go elsewhere for your media consumption, and ideally they want you locked into using their ecosystem by having as much content exclusive as possible. If they were to allow others to aggregate their content, then they are afraid that there's no opportunity for them to cultivate loyalty to their ecosystem.

[kuluba]

Leaving paid streaming subscriptions out, the more streamlined user experience would still be nice. LongMan here had suggestions and https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=348138 also went in the right direction.
Kodi is the base for plugins and gives the framework to hook into to others.

If ever a media provider is unhappy about a plugin, the plugin should get the heat.

[FXB78]

The big companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook make a ton of money by tracking your every move on the internet and building a profile on you for targeted ads etc. They won't even allow you to access facebook, instagram, google drive, google maps or any of the other sites they control without tracking cookies and god knows what else enabled in your browser. This is the modern day internet, companies are tracking everything you do and making money from it. Building a plugin to remove that power from them just wouldn't work, they would have it removed in an instant as it affects their revenue.

As much as we'd all like to see your suggestion happen, there is not a chance on earth Netflix, Hulu, Amazon would let it happen.

[scott967]

IIUC services like Roku allow you to search on a media title and will display all the providers that can supply that title, also showing what you have subscribed access to or if you need to buy some VOD.  It seems like Roku does assume the user wants to know where the title comes from.  When you select a provider, Roku loads the appropriate app for that provider, and I guess there is some API that passes the media title in so you don't have to repeat a search in the app.

scott s.
.

[kuluba]

You have services like JustWatch that do indexing across multiple services and offer trailers and sell the interests back to producers.
Users want reccomendations and continue their movies and tv series on other devices too so the tracking is even something you wish to be part of the addon.
Netflix author CastagnaIT invested a lot of research to sync the watch state with Netflix.

Therefore i don't think running a service in Kodi versus your browser or an App makes too much differences. They still get data to improve their service.

[kuluba]

Plex recently announced their solution to the problem, called discover
https://www.plex.tv/blog/end-the-streami...with-plex/
Have yet to try that, but it seems to be what i like to see in Kodi as well

[Hitcher]

But it costs them.

[kuluba]

In my mind it doesn't have to.
Plugins for certain media sources parse their specific library, kodi collects it and displays it in a common place.
Where do you need the monthly subscription in this case?