A number of unofficial services providing add-ons for the popular media-streaming software Kodi have disappeared from the web, including TVAddons, which was one of the primary sources of add-ons linking to copyrighted material.

Kodi lets you stream content from the web to your TV, computer and other devices. This makes it attractive to pirates, which in turn draws negative Legal attention from rights holders. The latest target of the authorities appears to be the popular TVAddons. Add-ons are software packages that add extra features to Kodi and can pull in content from sources including TV channels, YouTube and music-streaming services – places where pirated material can proliferate.

TVAddons was one of the largest collections of such tools, with 1,500 add-ons including Exodus. Reports suggest it had 40 million monthly visitors, but the site appears to have vanished from the web, with its various domain names redirecting to empty pages or error messages. It’s not known exactly why the site has disappeared, but it may be connected to an ongoing lawsuit against TVAddons in Texas in the US.

Other add-on repositories have followed suit, shutting down their services to avoid legal action. Legal takedowns aren’t always successful, however. Some add-on sites have been forced offline by legal action, but come back under a different name or via new domains.

Kodi has been a frequent target of action from the authorities and rights holders this year. Set-top boxes preloaded with Kodi and these types of add-ons have been banned from sale in the EU. There has been a series of arrests against those selling them, including five in the UK in February.

How will it affect you?

If you’re a Kodi user who installed add-ons from TVAddons to watch streams, you’ll need to find a new route. The shutdown will affect you regardless of whether the content you were streaming via TVAddons was legal or not.

Still, that doesn’t mean that Kodi is no longer functioning. You’ll simply need to find new add-ons for the content you were watching: while some add-on providers have disappeared, plenty of rivals remain online.

Although it’s unclear at the time of writing exactly why TVAddons has disappeared or whether it will return, rights holders have been using legal action to target illegal streams over their content, so such sources may become tougher to find. That could make Kodi more difficult to use, regardless of whether you’re using the add-ons to pirate or not.

What do we think?

The demise of TVAddons is being painted as a death knell for Kodi, but there’s another way to look at the issue. Kodi’s developers have frequently had to defend the software against accusations that it enables piracy, and it has indeed been used for that purpose. But as more and more illegal streams are removed from the web – by targeting add-on sites, for example – the case for Kodi as a legitimate streaming service actually grows stronger.

In other words, the closure of add-on sites – especially those that specialised in letting users stream pirated content – could help the legal case for keeping Kodi around. If users can no longer find pirated streams but are instead using the software to watch legal content, the argument by Kodi developers that their creation is benign grows in strength. So although the disappearance of add-on libraries may frustrate some users, especially those who do watch content illegally, it may help prevent Kodi itself from being shut down in the long term, which is good news for anyone using the software for legitimate streaming.