
Popcorn Time Is So Good at Movie Piracy, It’s Scary - caio1982
http://time.com/18867/popcorn-time-is-so-good-at-movie-piracy-its-scary/
======
kosei
Reminds me of the old Gabe Newell (Valve founder) quote:

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem... If a
pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the
convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product
is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and
can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service
is more valuable."

~~~
nlawalker
This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the
end user any money. When would the pirate's service _not_ be more valuable?

~~~
krschultz
I no longer pirate anything - haven't in 10 years. It was fun while I had no
assets, prefer not to risk getting sued these days. That said, there are many
times that I can't see a movie I want to see or watch a TV show that I want to
see even if I have my wallet out. Sometimes it is locked into HBO GO,
sometimes it is not available on Netflix/iTunes/Redbox. In all of those cases
I am sure it is available via bittorrent, but literally no one wants to just
take my money and let me watch the damn thing.

In those cases I simply don't watch it. It's not that important to me. But I'm
sure others at that point just say screw it I'm going to pirate it. Either way
- the industry makes no money off the viewer when they easily could have.

~~~
davidw
Even though I have a US credit card and address, I live in Italy and thus my
IP address gets flagged for a lot of things like Netflix or Amazon prime, so I
have to _pay_ to use a proxy service, to pretend I'm in the US, in order to
actually pay to see stuff streamed. It's fairly absurd.

~~~
waps
You are aware that watching netflix outside of it's service area is piracy,
right ?

Paying the wrong amount, or one way or the other not following the terms of a
licence (such as watching netflix outside of the US), is just as much piracy
as bittorrent is.

~~~
brownbat
> You are aware that watching netflix outside of it's service area is piracy,
> right ?

I'm not so sure.

"Piracy" isn't a well defined legal term, so I'm guessing we're talking about
copyright infringement here.

But US copyright primarily extends from US laws, which are hard to break if
you're in a foreign jurisdiction.

Treaties like the TRIPS agreement extend copyright (and other IP) rules and
enforcement to foreign jurisdictions, but it's not altogether clear that TRIPS
would require every jurisdiction to prosecute someone who receives a stream
from Netflix through an additional hop. (In fact, it obviously doesn't apply
everywhere, as some jurisdictions give complete waivers to copyright
infringement for personal use.)

More to the point, with streaming, it's not really clear the user has made any
copy that would be required for the violation in most jurisdictions.

I don't know the situation in Italy, but it's at least not a foregone
conclusion that using a VPN to watch Hulu or Netflix violates anything aside
from a terms of service agreement. An unenforced TOS provision hardly has the
same legal heft as copyright infringement (unless the CFAA is thrown at you,
but that's a whole different animal...)

~~~
waps
Even if this argument holds water (and as a US citizen you're bound by US law
whether or not you're in the US), you still agreed to a contract that you
wouldn't do this.

Now given that contract you agreed to with netflix, I think is pretty safe to
say that you're violating the law in every last jurisdiction on earth.

Sure they won't sue you for it, generally speaking. But you're definitely
violating the law.

~~~
brownbat
'Bound by US law in any jurisdiction' is too hasty a generalization.

Some laws, tax laws, apply regardless of jurisdiction, because jurisdiction is
found by some connection of yourself to the state. But if you commit murder in
Canada, that's a violation of Canadian, not US law (unless you're a member of
the US armed forces, in which case it's a violation of the Uniform Code of
Military Justice).

But more importantly, it's not illegal to break a contract.

You can't even get punitive damages for a breach. One example illustrating
this is US Naval Institute v. Charter Communications, 936 F. 2d 692 - Court of
Appeals, 2nd Circuit 1991.

Judge Posner explains why the law favors this in "Economic Analysis and the
Law" as follows:

"Suppose I sign a contract to deliver 100,000 custom-ground widgets at $.10
apiece to A, for use in his boiler factory. After I have delivered 10,000, B
comes to me, explains that he desperately needs 25,000 custom-ground widgets
at once since otherwise he will be forced to close his pianola factory at
great cost, and offers me $.15 apiece for 25,000 widgets. I sell him the
widgets and as a result do not complete timely delivery to A, who sustains
$1000 in damages from my breach. Having obtained an additional profit of $1250
on the sale to B, I am better off even after reimbursing A for his loss.
Society is also better off. Since B was willing to pay me $.15 per widget, it
must mean that each widget was worth at least $.15 to him. But it was worth
only $.14 to A – $.10, what he paid, plus $.04 ($1000 divided by 25,000), his
expected profit. Thus the breach resulted in a transfer of the 25,000 widgets
from a lower valued to a higher valued use."

~~~
waps
In order for any action to justify damages (under public law), one must
indicate to the satisfaction of the judge :

1) that action was illegal (violated law, contract provisions, ...)

2) that damages were incurred

3) that there was a causal connection between the action and the damages

It is pretty obvious what happens in most situations. For example if you
damage someone without violating the law, you cannot be punished for that
(well, not legally).

It is also pretty obvious that if you violate a contract, but it has no
consequences for anyone, you can't be punished for this (this is a major
difference between our -mostly- canon law and judaic or sharia law, where the
state/everyone is responsible to punish you even if no one was bothered by
your actions (the state in judaic law, everyone in sharia law, although muslim
states are in the process of changing this, because despite allah's "wisdom"
the part of sharia where everybody should attack everyone they believe to have
broken the law turns out to be massively counterproductive and destructive.
There are many such changes, the one I like to remind muslim nutcases of is
that sharia specifies the death penalty to any muslim not living under an
islamic state (something they thoroughly implemented during the crusades for
example), and there's plenty of fatwas of this)

What the judge illustrated is that he judged that condition 2 was not
satisfied in this case. There are lots of qualifications though. First, anyone
who was damaged was reimbursed (A), not just for the price he would have paid,
but on top of that for the resulting damages. I doubt you'd want to use this
very often, as it does mean paying damages. Also : this is a very "American"
judgement, and on the extreme side even for America. I would expect this not
to work on most judges.

Well sure, except that won't apply here since there is ample precedent of
courts finding copyright breaches do damage the copyright holder.

------
DigitalSea
I can understand why movie studios and copyright holders in the US would be
worried, Popcorn Time lets you watch movies for free much like a traditional
streaming service like Netflix offers. However, as an Australian, I see it
very differently.

In Australia there is nothing that comes anywhere near as close as Netflix. We
have cable TV in the form of Foxtel, but the price is about $110 AUD per month
to get the good movie channels and channels with popular shows on them. Then
we have the up and coming Fetch TV service which offers a somewhat good
alternative to cable, but nothing like Netflix or Popcorn Time does. There is
no online service like Netflix in Australia.

Sure, the price point is one thing, but I think Spotify has shown that an all
you can eat premium service at a decent price can help reduce piracy. When
Spotify launched in Australia a little while ago, I stopped downloading music
because Spotify was faster and more convenient, many of my friends did the
same.

Americans have a good range of choice when it comes to legal options for
movies and TV shows. People in Australia, New Zealand and other countries, not
so much and this is why torrents and applications like Popcorn Time will
continue to be the best alternative until content licencing for music and
movies/tv is sorted.

~~~
interpol_p
You can quite easily purchase Netflix in Australia if you feel bad about
piracy, and also dislike the options available to Australians. I'm unsure on
the legality (probably a grey area), but the point is you can pay money and
support the service. (Edit: using a DNS service like Getflix.)

~~~
asdfaoeu
I thought they also block Australian CC's?

~~~
dmix
I bought an American Netflix account with a Canadian credit card via VPN back
in the day. Not sure if that applies to aussies. They might have started
checking for this since then as well.

Even though we now have Netflix in Canada, the selection is awful compared to
the American one.

------
adamnemecek
It's pretty clever that all the movies shown in the screenshot of the app (at
[http://getpopcornti.me](http://getpopcornti.me)) are public domain.

~~~
sroerick
I wish there was actually a feature to show only public domain or CC movies.

~~~
Springtime
I agree, although the quality of PD films is generally mediocre from
everything I've seen. Seems mostly due to companies not bothering to perform
better transfers and clean-ups as it's not very profitable.

~~~
sroerick
Yeah. I'm with you there. Production quality, too. One of the hardest parts of
trying to boycott conventional Hollywood culture is making the aesthetic leap
to public domain.

------
steeve
For those on XBMC (aka who want to use their TV), I've been working on an
extension for the last 6 months called XBMCtorrent that does that:

[http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736](http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736)

It's based on libtorrent (C++), Golang, and Python.

The major difference is that since it's based on libtorrent, it has good
performance (even on low end CPUs like the RPi) and tries _very_ hard not to
weaken the swarm too much (even though it uses sequential downloading).

So this means it runs on Mac, Linux, Windows and even Android and Raspberry Pi
(OpenELEC).

~~~
felipebueno
Hi, Steeve!

Thank you for this awesome project. Can't wait to see it running on my RPi. =)

~~~
steeve
Seems like it needs more publicity :)

For your RPi, be sure to have enough space on your SD card. If the video
stutters, put a download speed cap.

------
meowface
>“We don’t host anything, and none of the developers makes any money. There
are no ads, no premium accounts, and no subscription fees or anything like
that. It’s an experiment to learn and share.”

Famous last words. The Pirate Bay has made the same defense, but companies and
law enforcement generally don't seem to care.

I would be shocked if they aren't sued or even prosecuted within the next year
or 2. Not that that's a good thing, just that being this open and carefree
about it will probably come to bite them in the ass later.

~~~
msh
TPB had ads.

~~~
_archon_
TPB had servers to pay for.

~~~
untog
Which makes TPB different from Popcorn Time, which is the point.

------
rattray
Looks like it's basically a mashup of the YFTY torrents api, a few other APIs
for subtitles/metadata, and the peerflix nodejs lib for streaming the
torrents. Done in node-webkit. The first commit was only 20 days ago,
according to github (could have rebuilt history of course), and the most
recent 3 hrs ago at time of writing. Seems pretty active.

It looks like "they're watching you" through Google Universal Analytics[0].
Not sure if that's something to be concerned about.

Sources:

[https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app](https://github.com/popcorn-
time/popcorn-app)

[https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/blob/master/pack...](https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/blob/master/package.json)

[0] [https://github.com/peaksandpies/universal-
analytics](https://github.com/peaksandpies/universal-analytics)

~~~
tarblog
Their first commit on GitHub may only have been 20 days ago, but they
certainly started working well before that. Their initial commit had a lot in
it.

[https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/commit/342c94a2a...](https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/commit/342c94a2af498228ee4be95d17c28e84f58bc856)

------
reidrac
Why can't I pay to have legally something like this? I want it!

I'm a Linux only user. What do I have right now? Well, Flash player + outdated
DRM technology (HAL is been dead for a while, Adobe don't care) or play with
Wine to run software that the vendor won't support in Linux.

And after tackling the outdated DRM issue with flash and paying for a movie
stream in Google Play, the best I can get is 480p. Really?

Seriously. Make it happen. Take my money.

~~~
johnnymonster
I have been saying this for years! I don't understand how music and movie
companies pay millions of dollars to fight these sorts of products but then
spend 10 dollars on delivery of their own content! This product is beautiful,
why is it that some dudes in south america can make something so wonderful and
the multi billion dollar movie industry can't do jack!

------
downandout
I realize this is an open source project, but I would steer far clear of
contributing any code to it. This app is no different than Napster. From a
civil perspective, its creators will be found liable for contributory
infringement. But that's just the beginning. They will also likely soon
experience a paramilitary style Kim Dotcom-esque raid on their homes and
offices, where they will be arrested and face decades in prison.

I am not sure what the point of releasing this app and making it accessible in
the US is. The FBI serves at the pleasure of large US corporations, and on
their request will turn these guys into cannon fodder.

~~~
oscargrouch
Welcome to United Corporations of America

------
ddod
"[torrenting] isn’t necessarily safe unless you’re using a virtual private
network to mask your whereabouts."

I find it really frustrating that TIME can publish such incorrect information
that could directly lead to the detriment of its readers. I've also seen a
couple people in HN saying a VPN is the "safe" way to torrent. Unless you're
sure a VPN service won't comply with subpoenas or you've paid in bitcoin, it's
not safer than not using one.

~~~
josu
You are just making it more difficult for LE to go after you. There are plenty
of low hanging fruits, you are just positioning yourself in the middle of the
herd when the wolf comes. Is it safe? Ok, no, you are right and your point
stands, but it is safe-er.

~~~
sroerick
It stops automated IP tracking from watchdog lawyer orgs. That's about it, but
that's a whole lot right there.

------
malandrew
I would really love if they offered a "bitcoin payment" option where the
studios who own the rights to a film can opt to get paid. That way all the
studio would have to do is set up a bitcoin wallet and the developers would
publish the wallet associated with a movie so that people consuming music can
voluntarily pay for what they consume.

Legally, most studios may not be able to take advantage of such a payment
option because of arcane licensing contract clauses, but most indie filmmakers
without such a burden could.

Ideally such a feature would come with some sort of agreement that a studio
absolves its right to pursue legal action upon payment of some reasonable
amount (like $2-$4 for a movie and $1-$2 for a tv show).

~~~
mattmanser
Sounds like a really easy way to launder bitcoin.

------
dspillett
_> “We don’t expect legal issues,”_

Really? This seems somewhat naive to me...

 _> “We don’t host anything, and none of the developers makes any money._

That has not posed a problem for those going after others in the past.

As soon as a large enough entity takes notice they'll run, either because
there is a case to answer or because they can't afford the legal team required
to prove there is not a case to answer.

~~~
nikolak
Couldn't the same be said for open source torrent clients/libs which are
fairly popular? I don't see anyone going after those, even though they also
don't have money for legal teams.

~~~
dspillett
Those clients/libs aren't getting articles in Time, and for the most part
aren't as slick and ready for the general (non-technical) public though.

------
Duhck
I've tried it a few times recently, and its pretty awesome.

The takeaway I have from this is that if hollywood chose to embrace this sort
of thing, they would solve distribution costs (seed vs host). Their cost will
be contained to just marketing and production. Be gone with the archaic
contracts and let people get the content when they want it in a way that makes
sense for everyone.

~~~
fragsworth
People to mention "Hollywood" like it's a single entity that can easily decide
the fate of everyone in the movie-making business. In reality, there are lots
of companies doing lots of different things and with lots of different
interests.

The only solution that allows them to compete with pirates is to have one
monopolistic mega-corporation that controls all the content, so it can sell it
easily without licensing issues. Any new content producers are somehow forced
to participate in this corporation. This is even implied by piracy advocates
who say "why can't Hollywood just do this"...

But I'm not sure that's really what we want.

~~~
derefr
> The only solution that allows them to compete with pirates is to have one
> monopolistic mega-corporation that controls all the content, so it can sell
> it easily without licensing issues.

Out-of-the-box thinking: what if the tickets to movies were sold in advance of
production, like a Kickstarter?

~~~
cschneid
See-Also: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-
veronica-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-
mars-movie-project/?ref=kicktraq)

$35 lets you buy the movie ahead of time. A bit steep compared with a dvd, but
not by much. (plus whatever other bonuses they threw in).

------
psychometry
Does anyone know how it works if they don't host any data? In order to stream
a movie from a torrent, you'd need to download chunks of the video file
sequentially started at the beginning in order to buffer and stream it. I
thought BitTorrent required chunks to be downloaded in a random order.

~~~
arg01
There is nothing to stop a request for a specific block of the data (i.e. one
close to the start). It does mean that the network is not as efficient in the
case of high demand (As your more likely to have the same chunks as others and
rely more on seeder). I'd assume the client (depending on how conscientious it
is) just prioritizes filling a buffer and then downloads other parts of the
file with any excess bandwidth.

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
But in high demand, the start is copied many times by peers, who can reupload
the start of the movie to each other.

~~~
arg01
Yes but the peers with less blocks tend to catch up to the peers with slightly
more blocks as they can download from more peers. This means you reach a point
where all the peers are after roughly the same set of blocks and few of the
peers have them, so the system is limited by connections to seeders.

It effectively degrades the delivery (especially near the source) into
something akin to a tree shape rather than a mesh. This can choke the network
considerably. This situation would be best alleviated by guaranteeing that
when a peer connects to the seeder/peer it downloads a block that is least
common in the network, or failing that (the overhead would be horrible) a
random block.

This is largely an issue while the torrent has few seeders (i.e. it's young
but many people are trying to download it) and you'd be right in assuming that
once the file has been available for a while the high demand would improve
performance (in the sense there are more people to download from) it's just
the initial download for those first trying to download the torrent would be
slower (potentially much slower). Though seeders that drop out after
completing a certain share/download ratio can cause the more rare end of file
pieces to be in even shorter supply as the majority of requests they receive
are for the start of file as the swarm grows.

~~~
sp332
I think the default is for a client to request the least common block from its
point of view. If it has 8 peers and only 1 of them has a block, it will get
that one first. That way it can then deliver that block to any of the other 7
that it's already connected to. This gets many of the benefits without all the
overhead of picking the globally-rarest block.

------
mountaineer
On a related note, what's the story behind MovieTube[1]? It streams many
movies that are still in theaters. I can't find out anything about it, but
word about it is making its way around my neighborhood and I'm telling people
it's not wise to use it.

[1] [http://www.youtubeonfire.com/](http://www.youtubeonfire.com/)

~~~
spyder
They seems to just stream the movies from YouTube.

------
arg01
So it looks like the key API that Popcorn Time uses is YTS. So I guess that
will be the target of any attempts to disrupt the service.

The entertainment industry is going to have to fight hard to remove geo-
locking, content siloing by producer, and other barriers to consuming their
service in the coming years to catch up with piracy's ease of use. If there's
no barrier to entry for the laymen to pirate then it will get worse for the
producers.

~~~
seppo0010
I think they are also using ThePirateBay now, based on its readme
[https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app](https://github.com/popcorn-
time/popcorn-app)

~~~
arg01
I haven't had time to have a proper look at it but it appears they were only
using the top movie list and aren't anymore.

I bring it up on the basis that the ease of use goal would rely on being able
to nearly always download the correct torrent(non fake) and using only the top
movies list or a rule on number of seeders may limit the catalogue. I guess
they could also use a trusted contributor list if they wanted to allow for a
more general list of movies in the case that YTS is not as resilient (for
whatever) reason as the pirate bay.

------
__pThrow
In my limited experience it seems that torrent clients were all trying to
migrate towards this and be a media browser first, torrent client second. The
end result was user flight to the next upcoming torrent client.

So was this a torrent client to start with?

For the end user how does this compare to websites like stream-tv.me which
aggregate links to tv shows? Those links lead to generally poor resolution
shows, but not unwatchable. TV resolution with some HD resolution. Have there
been cases where content providers go after the users of those sites? (I have
a friend who uses them...)

------
davexunit
Piracy is a loaded word.

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.html#Piracy](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy)

------
usaphp
There is a russian alternative (not sure which one came up first) called Zona
([http://zona.ru/](http://zona.ru/))

~~~
mikevm
Zona seems superior. Not only they let you pick among many different torrents
for a particular movie, they also let you view TV Shows, TV channels and
listen to music.

Edit: I've just tried Popcorn Time, and it looks like it stutters on 1080p
video...

------
frakkingcylons
I wonder if GitHub will be able to continue hosting their website and repo
considering the legal grey-area.

~~~
dav-
I cloned it to my computer and set up a `git pull` cron job for this reason.

------
Kiro
The eternal question which makes piracy unsuitable and complicated for me:
what about subtitles? As soon as you need to download it separately it's a no
go. It should be one click to activate a perfectly synced subtitle in at least
English.

~~~
Shorel
Subtitles stopped being an issue for me when I discovered XBMC.

Some buttons pressed on the wireless gamepad, done.

~~~
steeve
Well, you can try XBMCtorrent[1] (there is a post on the front page about it
too).

[1]
[http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736](http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736)

~~~
Shorel
Yes, just doing that right now.

------
programminggeek
Am I crazy in thinking that Popcorn Time is a trap? It feels like one of those
thins that is executed well enough that it will be seen as a threat and shut
down ASAP. OR... it will be allowed to continue as a way to easily catch
"pirates".

I personally believe that movie studios would do well to follow the Pirate
License([http://retromocha.com/pirate-
license.html](http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html)) approach, but I just
don't see them ever being that forward thinking when they are making millions
of dollars with the old way.

------
senthilnayagam
I am a Indian citizen, travel often to US, have a US citibank account, used
mostly for filling gasoline and to subscribe to netflix. had a paid tunnelbear
account as well(when I was in India or when I wanted to watch from netflix UK)
. about 6 months back that bank account was suspended as I need to submit some
documents for US tax authorities.

for apple app store though use apple gift cards, which my friends help me
with.

Now don't have netflix, but have watched most latest shows and oscar nominated
movies(which did not release in India) on torrent.

------
Cthulhu_
"We're not making any money off of it" is kind of a moot argument. It's like
breaking without entering.

~~~
omegaham
I was going to say something about how companies will sell lockpick sets to
anyone and that's perfectly legal even though it facilitates burglary, but I
thought of another example that might be more revealing.

Say I'm an asshole and make an app that scrapes Facebook statuses. I call it
"Who's Not Home?" If someone posts something like "On vacation in Barbados" in
their status, it puts their name and address (plenty of people put their
addresses on Facebook, or at least their general area) on a map. Why? I feel
like it. I'm not making any money off of it, and the software is completely
open source. Of course, the only real purpose of this is for burglars to get
easy targets.

Would this be legal?

~~~
aestra
This already exists.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7266120/Please...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7266120/Please-
Rob-Me-website-tells-burglars-when-Twitter-users-are-not-home.html)

------
artichokeheart
Thanks time.com! Great publicity. Downloading now.

------
EGreg
Indeed! I always met the assertion that people are willing to pay for easy to
use services with the question: what if pirate software becomes user friendly
as well?

After a lot of thinking about it, I believe copyright protection is valuable
to society and patent protection is much less so, or even detrimental. That's
because copyright protection is very narrow and in economic terms creates an
artificial contract between the authors and consumers, as if the consumers
hired the author for some small fee.

On the other hand, once the work is created, should the consumers freely share
it? Well, I don't see how to prevent it, so the laws and sanctions seem to be
the only way.

------
sdfjkl
Unlike Netflix, it doesn't want me to install dodgy clones[1] of a dying
technology[2] for no good reason[3].

[1] Silverlight [2] Flash [3] My browser can play several modern video formats
natively.

~~~
owenversteeg
It uses Silverlight to prevent piracy.

~~~
sdfjkl
You mean it uses Silverlight to encourage piracy.

------
neurobro
The movie industry should be more afraid of the video game industry than of
piracy. It's probably less than 5-10 years before it will be possible to auto-
generate somewhat entertaining feature-length sequences from the
viewer's/player's favorite game assets, and then another 5 years to push movie
studios into obsolescence (other than a niche market for the nostalgic old
folks).

Or instead of being afraid, they could fire the lawyers and invest that money
in this direction.

------
m4r71n
I couldn't find this anywhere: does the client support BitTorrent protocol
encryption and does it allow you to specify to download from encrypted peers
only?

~~~
crummy
uTorrent provides this feature, so I would assume the protocol does.

------
gcb0
Can someone pirate the article on a decent platform. The genius there made
something that it is now impossible to scroll on Android 2.3

Not even joking with the irony

------
spacesword
I had no idea node.js was this powerful, can somebody point me in the
direction so I can learn how to use PeerFlix to make something like this?

~~~
CStorm
[https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix](https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix)

------
balls187
Interesting.

Since it uses BitTorrent, and unlikely anonymously, I'd imagine that the MPAA
and their goonsquad are going to have a field day with this.

------
Paul12345534
It's just as easy to pay a monthly fee for Netflix, etc.... than it is to pay
for a VPN (and properly use it, a small mistake outs your IP) to avoid being
sued for torrenting.

Now... back in the Megaupload's heyday, things were a bit different. Lots of
content, little danger.

Personally I buy most of my content :) especially any program that I actually
make money using.

~~~
MichaelGG
Netflix has a poor selection, poor quality, poor playback controls, poor
filtering (audio/video, like audio normalization or brightness controls),
terrible subtitles and subtitle support (half the shows seem to have ALL CAPS
subtitles for some crap reason). Oh, and if you travel, the site's UI starts
flipping into multiple languages and subtitle selection gets worse.

And, there's no apparent way to force Netflix into HD. It's usually pretty
good about it, but I'd prefer to just wait a few minutes first and know I'm
set. Netflix _can_ be convenient, but searching on a torrent site, click
magnet, click OK, click stream is also fairly easy and eliminates the above
mentioned problems.

------
brianbreslin
This is an incredibly nice looking piece of software. I have to admit I've
become so conditioned to FEARING getting sued by the movie companies. I wish I
could pay for this. The movie selection of streaming/bundled movies on
netflix/hulu/amazon always disappoints me (new releases are never there).

------
rodolphoarruda
I would like to "test this software for unlimited time", if you know what I
mean. How do I install it in Ubuntu? I have downloaded the package and tried
to run it through the usual software installer, but it didn't work. Then I
went to their FAQ page but couldn't find any clues about it.

------
Legend
Reminds me of a work on detecting copyright monitors. Read the introduction
part to understand the risks of using torrents to stream movies.

[https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/fahmy/papers/PAM2011.pdf](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/fahmy/papers/PAM2011.pdf)

------
pkinsky
Antigua is still authorized by the WTO to suspend US copyright. I wonder if an
american startup could get away with running a hosted Popcorn Time service out
of an Antiguan data center. They'd need to register an Antiguan LLC, of
course.

Imagine Netflix, but with every film ever shot in Hollywood.

~~~
cbr
The last I heard Antigua had permission from the WTO to ignore US copyrights,
but hadn't actually changed their local laws to no longer require people to
respect these copyrights. Has this changed?

~~~
pkinsky
Interesting, I didn't know that. Nothing seems to have changed.

------
mikewhy
Disclaimer: I am the author of the channel.

Would like to mention SS Plex[1]. It doesn't use torrents, but it allows you
to stream and download content to a wider variety of devices.

[1]: [http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/](http://mikew.github.io/ss-
plex.bundle/)

------
milesf
Time magazine, who is owned by TimeWarner, runs a story on how to watch pirate
movies? TimeWarner, owner of Warner Bros and HBO? THAT TimeWarner?

I smell children
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnhfvGdmmw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnhfvGdmmw)

------
bruceb
Sometime sites/apps/people that are legally questionable are too high profile
for their own good. This might soon the case with Popcorn Time. It is like
being The Pirate Bay, Joaquín “El Chapo" Guzman, Kim Dotcom, etc big target on
your back.

------
johnnymonster
I had no idea node-webkit was a thing!!! There goes what little free time I
had.

------
forlorn
Damn leechers. This is how p2p and user-friendy apps actually kill torrenting.

~~~
rplnt
The app itself isn't seeding? This is both good and bad. The bad part is that
it really damages torrents, the good part is that it's legal.

~~~
higherpurpose
It's seeding while it's streaming, and I think while on your PC too (until
reboot), which seems like a pretty smart way to deal with seeding/leeching
ratios to me.

Legal? Seriously? You're downloading a free movie, and you're worrying whether
uploading it or not would be illegal? It's already illegal. But that hasn't
stopped people from using torrents, has it?

~~~
lawl
Not everyone lives in 'murrica.

In Switzerland (and Germany I think) downloading is perfectly legal. Uploading
is not, as you are distributing instead of just consuming.

Similar to how drug laws work here, you won't get busted for smoking a joint,
but you will get busted for selling stuff.

------
jotaass
This reminds me of the excellent tv.js. The same, but running in your browser
(plus node.js)

[https://github.com/SamyPesse/tv.js](https://github.com/SamyPesse/tv.js)

------
ChristianMarks
My solution is legal but unpopular: no MPAA movies, no RIAA recordings.

------
pgsch
There are better online (and without installing anything) alternatives, like
[http://peliculasio.com/](http://peliculasio.com/) (spanish)

~~~
Osiris
The advantage to it being offline (locally installed) is that someone cannot
simply shut down the website to block everyone. It is essentially just another
BitTorrent client with a really nice interface.

~~~
pgsch
They can shut down the trackers..

~~~
Dylan16807
DHT

Trackers are so 2008.

------
lettergram
Wouldn't have even known about this, thank you Time.com

------
nkg
was that advertising? If so, it worked just fine. While I had never heard
about that app, I've just installed it and forgot about every torrent website!

------
scrrr
Shouldn't somebody at time.com be charged with crime for posting a link to an
infringing site? ;)

------
shekhar101
Awesome! This is so neat! Since project is open source, any idea, how some
more sources can be added?

------
munimkazia
I was waiting for the first big mainstream node.js desktop app to come around.
This could be it.

------
antoinec
The most amazing thing to me about this is that it took that much time to get
to this software.

------
LeicaLatte
Popcorn time had been trending in github all of last week. Its starting to hit
mainstream now.

------
johnnymonster
well there goes yify torrents, with this much publicity on an app the movie
companies are gonna go after whoever they are getting their movies from...

------
babby
This is suprisingly convenient; but I've always wanted to build something like
this for years, but for power users.

Instead of streaming, it would be a node-webkit-esque app that allows one to;
\- Sync media over LAN, sync user's catalog everywhere with the option to sync
data from one PC over the internet \- Manage and browse media (By building a
catalog of items from several watched directories) \- Delete, move, rename
media easily. Perhaps even manage archive formats automatically
(autoextraction) \- An api for subtitles \- Build statistics, time watched, tv
shows added per x time etc. \- Store metadata like time media was paused at
(to resume at), with a visual indicator in the catalog view \- Automated
parsing of releases, soft renaming \- Scrape data for each item, generate tags
from that data, categories \- Archiving, sorting, grouping \- Personalized
catalogs of "what I watch". Kind of like how you might customize
[http://pogdesign.co.uk/cat/](http://pogdesign.co.uk/cat/) \- A real-time
tracker for new releases. It would query a web service which has a bot idling
in a prechan, then after parsing each release it is able to match to any item
that you watch and notify you that "this just came out". Alternatively, it
could, for TV, just utilize airtimes from TVRage \- Personalized page that
lists all of the stuff you are looking for. List of things that you haven't
downloaded yet but are in your list etc. \- Integrated user defined searches.
Allowing one to search their favorite sources autocompleted with things in the
application's local catalog of "stuff you want/watch". \- A nice dark
interface, surprisingly a lot like what Popcorn Time is doing, though much
more complex and functional. \- The ability to choose your own media player to
launch, thus giving up statistics, pause time and "watched" states. Would
require the user to commit this info themselves, with a form popping up
whenever they launch something from the app if they so choose. \- Multiple
sub-users per "catalog", so that one person would have access to the same file
but may not have watched/behaved the same way as another user on the network
\- Integrated "coming soon" feed for tv and movies that you could preemptively
select to be notified about. \- One big database file that would be dynamic to
the content available to it. This way the installation could be portable, and
whenever it detects its on a different system (Synced by a dropbox service or
a USB drive), the app will ask to specify watch-folders to sync with the
database so that one could keep track of their "catalog", add things to it
etc. \- Open source, built on node-webkit like Popcorn. No datamining, pro
privacy. \- Works in a browser, thus on phones (I guess some TV's/Consoles
too?) connected to the WLAN \- Integration of a "WebUI" from popular torrent
clients, with a custom standardized interface for all of them.

So basically XBMC for pirates, I guess.

Something tells me it's a niche market.

~~~
cornholio
Something tells me you've never visited the inside of a prison. What both your
'idea' and the Popcorn app share is a surprising level of centralization for
what is a highly illegal service. The fact that you have servers trawling the
known services where warez groups dump their material means you go to jail.
There's no if or but about it.

~~~
parktheredcar
It's pretty common practice to ship the app without any services configured
and let the pirates spread the 'illegal' .ini files, binary blobs, or whatever
else that plugs in to it.

------
betterunix
What is scary about this?

------
JungleGymSam
No, it's not scary.

------
alaxx
Don't worry. 3 More months and i'll be launching the next biggest movie site.
P2P Streaming, MP4, Apps, everything you can imagine... Fast/Sexy and no ads.

------
aortega
"Made with <3 by a bunch of geeks from Buenos Aires"

Oh not again...

