This week the news came out the top six ISPs in the country are working together to help combat the illegal streams of live Premier League games. Mr Justice Arnold approved the application from the FAPL to block the live streams of the football games.

BT, EE, Sky, PlusNet, TalkTalk and Virgin Media are working together to block the IP addresses coming from the servers where Kodi streams are originating. This kind of large scale block isn’t as simple as it sounds. The servers change their IP addresses on a regular basis in order to avoid being blocked, however a unnamed contractor was used to help assist in monitoring the feeds and where they come from, this process created a large amount of IPs that can be blocked.

Kodi isn’t illegal

People have been assuming that using Kodi at all is illegal. Part of the “bad press” comes from mainstream media websites and newspapers, but the actual software has been around for over a decade and it has been previously known as XBMC. It’s a well known home theatre software platform, it just happens to be easy to create plugins for it – which is useful for adding custom movie servers for in home use, the functionality has been unfortunately abused.

When will the streams be blocked?

The order has been accepted already and it’ll take place from March 18th and run until March 22nd. The blocks will only be activated when the games are being streamed and block lists are managed in real time and can be updated accordingly. The ISPs even have tools now to detect when and where new servers are popping up and block them in near real time.

Tags: