The Little Black Box That Took Over Piracy
https://www.wired.com/story/kodi-box-piracy/

The Kodi box pitch is hard to resist. A little black plastic square, in look not much different from a Roku or Apple TV, and similar in function as well. This streamer, though, offers something those others never will: Free access to practically any show or movie you can dream of. No rental fees. No subscriptions. Just type in the name of a blockbuster, and start watching a high-definition stream in seconds.

For years, piracy persisted mainly in the realm of torrents, with sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid connecting internet denizens to premium content gratis. But a confluence of factors have sent torrent usage plummeting from 23 percent of all North American daily internet traffic in 2011 to under 5 percent last year. Legal crackdowns shuttered prominent torrent sites. Paid alternatives like Netflix and Hulu made it easier just to pay up. And then there were the “fully loaded” Kodi boxes—otherwise vanilla streaming devices that come with, or make easily accessible, so-called addons that seek out unlicensed content—that deliver pirated movies and TV shows with push-button ease.

“Kodi and the plugin system and the people who made these plugins have just dumbed down the process,”