timboricki wrote:
Is it worth buying?
I was at a friends house this weekend and they had an app on theirs that appeared to allow you to watch live cable tv (IE - NFL games) by streaming it.
Also had free premium cable shows (Game of Thrones, etc).
The quality was a bit spotty at times.
Is this legal?
Most likely he had Kodi (or Wookie, which is based off Kodi, and both are apps) sideloaded on the Firestick, which was jailbroken, meaning it's been reconfigured to allow loading of apps onto it without going through the Amazon app store, which is what sideloading is.
Jailbreaking and sideloading a Firestick is pretty easy and there are dozens of online articles on how to do so. If you don't want to do that yourself, you can find plenty of ads in most any Craigslist, or on Ebay, for new Firesticks that are already jailbroken and sideloaded. Typically, they run anywhere from $60 to $80 around where we live.
Like others have said, a Firestick serves about the same legitimate purpose as a Roku box, and it allows you to access all of Amazon's services -- plus use apps like Netflix, HBO Now, etc. through it -- through a single device. One of the main attractions of a Firestick for some who've cut the cable cord and now stream their content is the ability to load apps such as Kodi and Wookie onto the Firestick once it's jailbroken. Amazon, so far, hasn't made any attempt to prevent jailbreaking its device and it doesn't appear as if it's inclined to do so, either.
I think Amazon -- in an attempt to cut down on the slurping or, to speak plainly, pirating of paid content such as movies (especially movies, including pretty much any first-run movie still in theaters) -- has quit offering Kodi in its app store. Kodi's developers are upset about this, maintaining they had nothing to do with the jailbreaking and sideloading thing, and that their app wasn't intended to be utilized in this manner in the first place.
Many Firestick users who have Kodi or Wookie sideloaded also use a virtual private network or VPN to reduce the possibility of attracting attention from paid content providers and receiving a notice in the mail from them, telling them nicely (at first) to stop watching all that paid content without paying for it. If you think of a Firestick/Kodi combination as being somewhat akin to the old Napster or Limewire and other peer-to-peer (though Kodi isn't peer-to-peer, per se) services that allowed you to download MP3 music to your computer or MP3 player you wouldn't be completely off the mark, at least in terms of the concept.
You can't 'rip' or download the movies, TV series' and other content you can find through Kodi (including global people watching stuff, such as karaoke night at the Cat's Meow down in the French Quarter of New Orleans, LOL!), at least as far as I know, but why would you need to? One gateway to 'providers' (Pelispedia, Primewire, etc.) that I know of on Kodi and Wookie, arranges much of its offerings by year and genre (and by star, studio, and so forth) going back 50 years. If you wanted to watch most any movie that hit the theaters in 1985, for example, you're able to do so pretty much anytime you want.
The above should give you a pretty good idea about the Firestick and its legitimate and not-so-legitimate uses for it. ;-)
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