Kodi’s development team has decided to surprise us by introducing an all-new feature via their freshly published blog post. Called ‘KodiTV MultiPass’, this feature is poised to be deployed to existing Kodi installations, bringing an all-new media streaming functionality. As the blog post notes, KodiTV MultiPass will bring ‘the best of all major content providers’ by combining their content libraries into a universal add-on.
At the moment, it was announced that media streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, and YouTube Premium are on board. All of these will serve their content via the latest version of Kodi – at a certain price. More precisely, we’ll have four subscription plans, as follows:
At the moment, Kodi users in North America (not including Canada) and Europe will get to enjoy the new feature first. Apparently, the broadcasting rights don’t allow Kodi to offer the service to other regions yet. The KodiTV MultiPass add-on is going live at 00:00 UTC, April 1!
It sure is strange timing for this announcement to happen. As you know, today is April Fool’s Day – celebrated across the entire planet. With this said, you can expect ingenious jokes from many tech companies, who are using today’s date to ‘promote’ their services and products. As you can be sure that there’ll be plenty of outrageous announcements on April 1.
Now, let’s return to KodiTV. As interesting as this joke sounds, something like this is close to impossible to happen these days. Services such as Netflix and Hulu base their revenue on selling subscriptions. They don’t sell individual titles as their business models revolve around recurring monthly fees (whose price has been recently increased).
Furthermore, Netflix is experiencing a massive mobile revenue growth, which means that lowering the price of this service isn’t an option, at least not right now. Finally, it seems impossible that service such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon would ever allow any third-party to combine their content libraries and sell subscriptions in a unified way - even though this surely sounds like an attractive option, right?
Finally, as you can see, the KodiTV addon should be already available for download. However, you won't find any mention of it on the official website of Kodi (except in the recently published blog post) or within the application itself. With this in mind, we conclude that this is just a clever April Fool's joke.
Let’s not forget that Kodi’s developers have been quite passionate about April Fool’s Day during the recent years. In 2018, they announced that Kodi is returning to its roots by changing its branding to ‘XBMC’ and being available for Xbox consoles only.
Also, in 2017, Kodi’s team has announced that it’s website has been seized by the authorities. As you can see by following the provided link, this was yet another cleverly designed April Fool’s joke.
So, what do you think about this April Fool’s joke? Would you be interested in using KodiTV? Let us know in the comments section below. And also, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks!