Kodi piracy hit with another blow as TVAddons goes dark

Another week, another blow for those that use the Kodi media center app and applications for piracy.

A report from TorrentFreak is now suggesting that TVAddons, a giant repository for Kodi add-ons – many of which are used to gain access to pirated material – has gone dark.

Kodi: the good, the bad and the illegal

With over 40 million unique visitors a month, it will be a huge victory for those looking to protect copyrighted materials. Visit the site and you'll be presented with an unresponsive page, with its DNS entries removed.

Disappearing act

It's not yet clear if TVAddons has shutdown, has temporarily gone dark, or if it's been pulled offline by its domain registrar. The downtime comes just a week after news broke that TVAddons was being pursued by a federal court in Texas.

The news follows a similarly bleak turn of events for ZemTV and Phoenix add-ons, which have shut down in the face of a legal battle against US satellite broadcaster Dish Network.

Kodi is an open-source media center which facilitates streaming from web video sources. While its development team do not condone piracy, the open nature of the software has allowed the platform to be hijacked by pirates, offering copyrighted films and TV shows free of charge for those that install the associated add-ons.

The software will soon be getting a major update. The Kodi 18 Leia release being teased promises Android lean-back features and even version to take advantage of 64-bit systems.