
Popcorn Time in Your Browser - programmernews3
http://popcorninyourbrowser.net
======
DigitalSea
You know the traditional business model of Hollywood is well and truly broken
when an open source application like Popcorn Time comes along and does
everything right. What Popcorn Time has done by making accessing content on
demand easier than ever before is nothing short of impressive.

They're the Netflix of piracy and I think Hollywood can learn a lot from
Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).

~~~
Narkov
Everything right? Except of course monitize it.

Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much
harder.

~~~
Sir_Substance
You've fallen into the classic trap:

No one is obliged to give you money. Finding a business model that works is
_your_ problem, not your customers.

Forced lock-in is a model, but it's a violent one that makes people want to
leave, and it's entirely predicated on there never being an escape hatch for
your trapped customers.

There is now an escape hatch for content customers. They're no longer beholden
to the choice of cinema or TV for their content, and haven't been for years.
Whining about how much more money you made in the old days when people
couldn't escape the cage really doesn't enamor you to people.

It's on hollywood to find a new business model that works in a post-cage
world. If they can't, they'll go bankrupt and vanish, and I won't care.
There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of good content out there that's either low
investment (think Primer) or can pay for itself in box office and/or
merchandising alone (marvel, star wars, lord of the rings).

If your content creation is predicated on selling DVD's or subscriptions, and
your DVD/subscription mechanism is so bad people are willingly buying VPN's to
other countries to avoid using it (netflix in aus), that's not your customers
problem in any fashion, it's yours.

~~~
martypitt
No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I
created. At that point, they are.

Anything else assumes that because content exists, people have the right to
consume it -- for free if they can work out how.

Let's be clear: I fully agree that Hollywood needs to catch up, and make
content accessible in the way that Popcorn time has. But I don't have the
right to consume content illegally, just because I find their business model
inconvenient.

~~~
astalwick
I consider piracy to be a form of protest.

I'm happy to pay, as long as the terms are reasonable. (I have a Rdio account
that's been active for years now - I can't remember the last time I pirated
music... I can't remember the last time I pirated software, either).

However, in Canada, the only way to watch (for example) Game of Thrones is to

a) get a massive cable subscription which includes 1000 channels you don't
want and HBO (which itself has 100 programs you don't want to watch and GoT),

b) wait for the episode to show up on itunes and pay $4.50 _per episode_
(whaat?) (and oh, season 5 isn't available yet),

c) pirate.

Is it a huge surprise that a lot of people choose option C? And can you blame
them? At a certain point, non-Americans specifically just get fed up with
being told "sorry, no, that content isn't available in your region."

~~~
martypitt
Is it a surprise? No. What you've described is downright annoying. It seems
nonsensical to me that hollywood makes it so difficult for me to give them
money to watch Game of Thrones.

But, Piracy isn't a form of protest, any more than stealing a car is --
regardless of how reasonable you consider the price.

~~~
astalwick
Laws aren't all equal. Stealing a car is zero-sum: if I take your car, _you no
longer have a car_ , which is a very, very expensive toy.

If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for _every single person in the
world_ except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply
gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you
still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).

Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly
different because I contribute to a metric that content producers _do_ pay
attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.

They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not
available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that
there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll _fix
it for everyone_.

(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).

Btw, you're being unfairly downvoted. Sorry.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
If you would've otherwise read a book. Had the ability to pirate not been
available, a non-zero number of individuals would've paid. Hollywood is stupid
thinking everyone would have otherwise paid. But anyone who insist that
everyone pirating would've read a book instead is making the same mistake.

------
SchizoDuckie
> Coinado is a remote torrenting service. We do the torrenting for you, worry
> about seeding, keep your privacy and deliver the file over an encrypted
> connection. Requesting a file is simple. You just append the info hash of
> the torrent to the Coinado domain and when you start the download, the
> torrenting happens transparently on our servers and a minute later the file
> starts streaming to you.

That sounds like a solid idea all around. I though this was the javascript
torrent client implementation, instead, it relies on yet another service that
can be taken down.

~~~
slang800
Aww, that's a shame. I was really hoping that this was a clever use of
websockets like [http://webtorrent.io](http://webtorrent.io) is.

~~~
nacs
> I was really hoping that this was a clever use of websockets like
> [http://webtorrent.io](http://webtorrent.io) is

WebRTC not websockets.

------
VeejayRampay
Popcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing
a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start
watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue
from this and build something that people actually want to use.

~~~
nothrabannosir
I never used either, so I'm genuinely curious: what does Netflix lack, from
that list?

~~~
sz4kerto
Availability and content. I'd be very happy to use Netflix if a) it were
available around here* b) if it provided the same selection as in the US

*: random country in the EU

~~~
qubex
As somebody in the same predicament and locale, I often find myself wondering
whether it is any less objectionable to rent a VPN connection through the
States.

~~~
kriro
I'm pretty sure the problem wouldn't be the VPN but rather the payment. Iirc
they only accept US based credit cards/paypal for Netflix US. I researched it
briefly a while back before Netflix was available here.

It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and
the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.

~~~
germanier
I pay for US Netflix with my German credit card each month, it is charged in
US dollar.

------
feross
Every few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or
weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for
the owner.

I'm going to ignore the piracy aspect of this site (since I don't support
copyright infringement) and just talk about the implementation. This site is
connecting to a centralized service to fetch the torrent data. It's not P2P,
it's easy to censor, and it likely won't be around for long.

What we really need is a true P2P implementation of BitTorrent in the browser.
I'm working on just such a project: WebTorrent
([http://webtorrent.io](http://webtorrent.io)).

You can see a demo here: [https://instant.io](https://instant.io)

Here is a link to watch Sintel (Creative Commons 3.0):
[https://instant.io/#c6642b73cf82dc52b5d538fabfdf9c8e3d9e850f](https://instant.io/#c6642b73cf82dc52b5d538fabfdf9c8e3d9e850f)

WebTorrent is powered by WebRTC, the de-facto standard for connecting two
peers in the web browser. It even works in desktop apps (via Electron or
NW.js) and mobile apps (via embedding the webrtc.org library).

With WebRTC, we can connect all types of endpoints (desktop, web, mobile)
directly and _completely P2P_. This is the underlying transport that all
future P2P protocols should be built upon.

Right now, the primary limitation of WebTorrent in the browser is that you
can't just paste in any random magnet uri or .torrent file and have it work.
The torrent must be seeded by a WebRTC-capable client, i.e. webtorrent-hybrid
([https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-
hybrid](https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid)) or
[https://instant.io](https://instant.io).

We plan to build a desktop client (soon!) that can connect to normal
BitTorrent peers, as well as WebRTC peers. These long-running peers will
ensure there's lots of content available in the network that the shorter-
running web peers can access.

This is the vision: All torrent clients (desktop, web, mobile) talking
directly to each other. If you're interested in learning more about the idea
of "WebRTC everywhere", here are some links:

[https://github.com/webrtcftw/goals/issues/1](https://github.com/webrtcftw/goals/issues/1)

[https://github.com/jbenet/random-
ideas/issues/13](https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/13)

~~~
realusername
Thanks for your awesome work ! I guess when the WebTorrent protocol will be
implemented in libtorrent, suddenly, everything is going to change. Right now
it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but I'm really confident your project
will enable a whole new class of applications which are not possible to build
easily currently.

------
N0RMAN
Source:
[https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser](https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser)

~~~
benwaffle
oh dear
[https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser/blob/master/j...](https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser/blob/master/js/movies.js)

~~~
bobysmity
[http://tomthepainter.github.io/PopcornTimeMovies/](http://tomthepainter.github.io/PopcornTimeMovies/)

for a clear list ;)

------
runn1ng
Note: this depends on [https://coinado.io](https://coinado.io), that's for
free only for a limited time

After they start charging actual money (...well, Bitcoin), this will stop
working.

------
egeozcan
This reminds me of joker[1], with the benefit of not expecting you to feed it
a torrent (or expecting you to know what a torrent is).

I genuinely wonder, though, if these services are published just to annoy the
copyright owners or for some benefit to the author that I sadly cannot see.

edit: They also do not seem to serve ads. Maybe an experiment for a potential
legal version? Who knows...

[1]: currently out of service, used to be available at
[http://joker.org/](http://joker.org/) , discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520954)

~~~
verbin217
Because fuck media conglomerates, that's why. Sorta like Google Chrome:
because fuck Microsoft, that's why. When an entity achieves dominance they
only innovate in order to keep it. The difference between this situation and
the one I compared it to is that there's no way to legitimately compete. Even
in the contrasting example it took an entity the size of Google to revive
competition. In this one they control the content and dictate the platform.
The most competitive platforms, in terms of user preference, can be starved of
content and displaced by alternatives only the media conglomerates could
desire. Do you honestly think we'd have gotten Netflix without torrents? The
people who desire progress or otherwise to actually _do_ things have two
choices. They can either repress that desire or they can out-hack the
regressive empire builders who desire only to _have_ things.

~~~
eridal
yep, they are called _barrier to entry_[0], and those big conglomerates have
_huge barriers_ , being the current legislation the biggest..

the question is if they will be able to handle the economy of scale of the
whole world trying to move forward --I hope not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry)

------
tmikaeld
Seems to be getting the file from: [https://coinado.io](https://coinado.io)

So with this, i really question the "privacy" and legality of this service and
coinado.io.

~~~
czechdeveloper
Popcorn time never pretended to be legal. It just provided great user
experience to "old" torrenting.

~~~
tmikaeld
Of course, i don't think i even mentioned Popcorn.

------
koolkat
I think that it has something to do with distribution. Most of the business
was about distribution. Before it was dificult to distribute the information
(music, movies etc) so you needed to hire someone to distribute your product
and you paid a company which had the infrastructure to do so. This middle man
soon became a cartel controlling distribution. Now distribution is easy and
abundant so obviously it changes everything. They were selling a solution for
something that used to be dificult that now is easy. Its like if your business
was selling water in the desert and one day someone finds easy acces abundant
water. Lets remember that most of the money is going to distributors not
creators.

------
iM8t
I love the idea, but what about copyright issues? It's easier for Hollywood to
take down a single site than to take down thousands of people having an
installed application.

Other than that - great implementation. I didn't know this was even possible!
Good job.

~~~
mavdi
It's back to the good old Whac-A-Mole game. Here is a list of blocked domains
in the UK, which has grown insanely in last year alone
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_United_Kingdom)

------
senorito
What is the big deal about this at all?

Seriously, I don't get it. All I can see is that I can choose from some movies
and stream them.

But that's neither innovative nor new ...

~~~
shmerl
You can also save them, since it has no DRM. That's "innovative" (semi-sarcasm
intended). Meaning that it's actually consumer friendly, unlike what is
normally offered.

~~~
senorito
vodly.to f.x. seems to offer way more advanced and comfortable Digital Left
Management ...

------
Schwolop
I want an amnesty on piracy, paid for by an increase in my taxes, then used to
fund government grants and financial support for content creators.

Content should default to free and accessible, with few exceptions. Content
creators should be able to earn a living.

Those two statements are not mutually exclusive, but the current status quo
makes them so.

~~~
joeyespo
Essentially, a basic income?

That would also create content creators. That is, allow people who would not
normally create content from lack of time or security to begin doing so.

It would also eliminate the waste caused from having a big department to
determine who exactly "content creators" are.

~~~
Schwolop
Yep, that'd do it. :-)

------
shmerl
That's how one should make a video service. Simple, user friendly and DRM-
free. Until the backwards thinking film industry will learn this, they'll
remain in the dark ages.

------
amazon_not
Does not appear to work, at least not on an iPad. Media player either does not
start playback or issues a timeout.

~~~
cliveowen
Not working on Chrome on Mac OS X 10.9.5, either.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Works on that combo for me. In what way is it "not working"?

------
milankragujevic
if anybody's looking for a working alternative now that the original site is
dead, check this out:
[http://betterpopcorn.imilan.me/](http://betterpopcorn.imilan.me/)

------
wengzilla
is this traceable to an individual computer? for instance, if i am using this
on a college campus that traditionally bans the use of torrents, am i likely
to get caught?

~~~
path411
I don't think the college would be able to detect it as normal torrent
traffic, but it would be pretty trivial to catch you using this specific
site/service once your campus hears about it.

------
tmikaeld
Requests currently giving 502 bad gateway.

------
throwaway_97
I found that at least in qBittorrent you can download media in sequence and
consume it as it downloads. VlC seems to work fine even though it will prompt
you about building a index first.

------
yAnonymous
They should probably use SSL by default, but other than that it's an amazing
idea and implementation, legal issues aside.

------
WorldWideWayne
Is this better than Kodi + Genesis?

------
cekanoni
That's amazing i love popcorn. But i cant see the latest movies that are in
popcorn app ?

