So you’ve sat down to watch a movie or a TV show, you turn on Kodi, go into your favorite add-on like Exodus, go to pick your show and the error comes up: “No Stream Available”. What does it mean? There is a large misconception about what this error means and we want to try and help people out.

What Does “No Stream Available” in Kodi mean?

There is a misconception that Kodi add-ons are some magical treasure box of information that store information and links to every single movie and TV show on the internet. Multi-source Kodi add-ons like Exodus are simply glorified search engines. The list of movies and TV shows they offer are provided from the API key of a service like Trakt, IMDB or themoviedb. The list of links to each show are scraped from all of the sources loaded into the add-on. They store no streams and do nothing to update the list of shows or movies.

Misconception: If a Kodi add-on lists a specific movie or TV show, there must be a stream available.

This is not true. Again, the list of movies and TV shows is just grabbed from another source like Trakt or themoviedb and presented in the add-on. If those services list a movie that comes out in theatres two weeks from now, this says nothing about whether a stream is available.

Misconception: I’m searching for an older TV show or movie I know is released, so there MUST be a stream available.

Also not true. Add-ons like Exodus, SALTs, or Velocity simply scan the streaming websites loaded into them for available links. If none of these websites have working links to load, you will get the “No stream available” error. The older or more obscure your search is, the less likely that streams are available. Talk shows, old movies, or TV shows that air on less-popular channels or countries are less likely to having working links.