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Pioneer Kodi plug-in unplugs

Too risky, too spammy, too smutty, say devs

Developers of the popular Kodi plug-in Navi-X have pulled the plug on further development, citing the "current legal climate" around its work.

The developers of the plugin, which first appeared a decade ago, state that they're no longer able to host Navi-X programme guides:

"Hosting Navi-X playlists is no longer something we feel comfortable doing due to the potential liability that comes with it," they write. They also find they've been flooded by ads for paid IPTV service and take issue with poor labelling of adult material.

The absence of Navi-X will make it more difficult to find streams without paying for them - at least temporarily.

Trading standards officers have launched raids against sellers of "preloaded" Kodi boxes, which take the open-source Kodi software and add plug-ins and services, giving one=click access to paid services which require a subscription.

Kodi's community managers have asked users to grass up pirate vendors for the sake of the platform:

"If you see somebody selling a box that’s “fully loaded” or comes with the phrase “Free movies and TV with Kodi,” please, ask them to stop. And let us know. It’s OK to sell a vanilla Kodi box.

"It’s OK to sell a fully loaded box that doesn’t have Kodi installed or fully rebrands Kodi to something else entirely. It is not OK to sell a fully loaded Kodi box," Nathan Betzen wrote last year.

Last month the ECJ removed any likelihood of a legal loophole for the sellers, declared selling preloaded Kodi boxes or sticks was illegal.

The Premier League has just concluded an experiment using real-time blocking of the server addresses used by content farms.

In March, a survey found that only 11 per cent of consumers who download unlicensed material were using Kodi-based streaming devices to access illegal content. ®

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