In recent years, we have seen how Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) has gained a very bad reputation within the industry due to its association with piracy, although this type of content is not the only one consumed, it is the most common on the platform.
Regardless of your opinion on the matter, it appears that Sony has clearly begun to adopt this viewpoint and, according to a large number of users, has started blocking the use of the application on its Android TV-powered models.
Kodi is an open-source application that allows you to stream content, as well as access content locally over a local network or remotely. Its user interface has been optimized over the last 15 years to provide one of the best user experiences currently available.
Well done @SonyElectronics for actively preventing users from installing Kodi on their newer Android TVs. How grown up of you. Even their firmware in the TVs is broken. Guess we will suggest users to just buy something else that does work.
— Kodi (@KodiTV) January 4, 2019
The official Kodi project Twitter account pointed out Sony's problem with Kodi a couple of days ago, but reports on the Kodi forums about installing and running the app from the Play Store go even further than last year.
A large number of affected enthusiasts believe they have discovered the cause of the problem: Sony appears to be blocking the package ID, preventing the application from installing or running . Supporting this theory is the fact that recompiling the application from scratch with a different ID allows it to function.
If you want, you can always install the program on another device; here's how Kodi works.
It's worth remembering that Sony not only sells televisions and smartphones (although not many of the latter) but is also one of the major producers of both music and films , so the consumption of pirated content through this application affects them, although we don't know how it might impact their revenue, since thanks to video and music streaming services, piracy has been considerably reduced in recent years.
