71% of households with Kodi can access unlicensed content: Sandvine

The vast majority of households with Kodi in Canada have the software configured to access unlicensed content, according to a report by Sandvine Corp. Out of the over 100,000 Canadian households observed, nearly three-quarters of the 9.7 per cent of those with the Kodi media player—or seven per cent of all households—can access unlicensed content through unofficial “add-ons,” though that doesn’t necessarily mean they do as the software allows for licensed material as well, the report said. By comparison, Sandvine found only six per cent of United States households have Kodi set up to receive unlicensed content. The report was submitted to the CRTC last week as part of its consultation on a proposal from a coalition called FairPlay to block access to illegal content, according to a Sandvine blog post this week. But it’s not just Kodi that’s contributing to viewership of unlicensed content. The report also found a “new emergent form” of media access that utilizes subscriptions to get live TV. For $10 a month, “these services allow subscribers to access thousands of channels from both Canadian and international broadcasters, with no money at all going into the pockets of the content producers or rights holders,” the report said. Sandvine pegs the number of Canadian households—obtained both from network data and info from online forums—with subscriptions to unlicensed content at 8.3 per cent out of the more than 100,000 subscribers observed, contributing to over 7.5 per cent of downstream traffic in peak evening hours. Overall, set-top boxes drive almost 95 per cent of TV piracy traffic, it found. The same report also found Canadian household BitTorrent usage plummeted to 1.6 per cent in 2017 compared to 15.1 per cent in 2014, based on traffic. That’s due to advancements in technology which have led to “fully-loaded” Kodi systems and subscription TV piracy services, it said. “Sandvine believes that emergent forms of piracy such as the “Fully-Loaded” Kodi ecosystem and subscription television piracy represent a real threat to the revenue streams of network operators,” Sandvine concluded. The data was gathered in February 2017 for the fully-loaded Kodi figures and September 2017 for subscription TV piracy and BitTorrent use and came from “multiple North America tier one fixed-line communications service providers (CSPs),” Sandvine said.

71% of households with Kodi can access unlicensed content: Sandvine

Brief | April 6, 2018

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71% of households with Kodi can access unlicensed content: Sandvine

Brief | April 6, 2018

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