Android Future TV??

I've seen a few of these around being sold by various no-name companies. Basically, they've (or "he," since this is probably just one person) taken a $80-100 Android streaming box and loaded Kodi and a bunch of less than legal plug-ins/channels to sell at a markup.

As I understand it, you're fairly safe from a legal standpoint. Don't trust me without a better source. But the reason that Justin.TV was around for as long as it was and no one on the user side was prosecuted was something to the effect of "when streaming content available online, the person viewing the stream can assume that the person hosting the stream is acting in a legal fashion and has the rights to do so." The hosting of the stream is illegal, but viewing it is not.


That said (and again, I could be very much mistaken), I'm fairly certain that if I were being asked whether I thought there was any legal way to watch a movie that's still in theaters from my home for free, I would have to lie to say "yes." It is possibly, even close to likely, that viewing it is legal. It's almost definitely violating some terms of use on someone's part. You can choose whether that's something that's OK with you or not (after you've hopefully done a little more looking into it than any advice you've gotten here, though you'll likely be quite safe legally either way).

The legality isn't really an issue -- at least not for me. I'm just saying it's an Android box with stuff you can load by yourself rather than paying the markup.

I suppose you'd need to read some tutorials about XBMC/Kodi to get it set up, so buying the box already set up would save time. However, seeing as this guy sells jeans and collectibles on eBay (or is using his wife's ebay account), I would imagine the level of support/warranty for it would be non-existent. Those "gray area" Kodi/XBMC addons sometimes have a tendency of disappearing or changing hosts/names, so you'd eventually be on your own to learn about repositories, addons, plugins, etc. anyway.

As a replacement for cable, that really depends. In general, there is no single, all-in-one solution for every person looking to cut cable. Personally, I have not found even a combination of solutions that would appease my wife enough to stop watching cable. It seems a lot of people on the tech board are in a similar situation -- their wives, like mine, are channel-surfing trash-TV watchers. There is no alternative other than changing habits. If you or your wife watches the array of programming you might find on Bravo, TLC, A&E, WE, MTV, OWN, etc., and you aren't willing to go without it (or find a torrent site to download it), then no streaming box will fulfill that. It's not a magic box that gives you a backdoor to live cable programming. It's simply a convenient, all-in-one means of managing and accessing your files, as well as the internet streaming services, both legal and "other," that you can already access on your computer.