
Goodbye Popcorn Time - redox_
https://medium.com/p/93f890b8c9f4
======
nasalgoat
On the topic of pirated content, I was an early contributor to the Veronica
Mars movie Kickstarter, and I received my "digital download" today.

It consisted of a link to sign up to _two separate websites_ to download a
_specific player_ that would stream the video for me on _supported platforms
only_. Also, the HD version might not be available right away.

I checked and the torrent of the HD version had been online for 30 minutes
already.

Why do they bother with this bullshit? It makes no logical sense and all it
does is hurt them.

~~~
b3b0p
I was also a contributor to the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter.

When I received my email today and found out it was Ultra Violet, I was quite
upset. I emailed the address they have listed on the F.A.Q. site with my
complaint.

I backed the Kickstarter, but in order to watch it on my AppleTV I have 2
options: 1. Purchase from iTunes. or 2. Pirate.

The money I spent to back the Kickstarter could have been used for the iTunes
copy. Which doesn't need an external player and is easily accessible on my
AppleTV. The iTunes version may have DRM, but it's easily strippable if I
desire to back it up for example.

Edit: Some spelling.

~~~
DanBC
You kickstart something because you want to help them make it, not because you
want a product in return.

While you could strip the copy protections that's a crime.

~~~
Einstalbert
I'm not sure what is unclear about, "If you donate X, you will receive Y."
That's not a simple donation, it's a pre-order.

~~~
DanBC
It is very clear. It is also dishonest.

That's a serious problem with Kickstarter - they allow groups to offer tiers
that appear to be pre-orders and do nothing when those pre-orders are not
delivered.

Kickstarter isn't going to stop doing this despite all the criticism. So
people need to keep reminding everyone that tier rewards are menaingless.
Maybe you'll get the reward, maybe you won't, but you don't back a project for
the reward but because you want to see the project succeed.

Repeating this message may make kickstarter stop projects being dishonest with
reward tiers.

~~~
icelancer
It will also cause a significantly lower amount of investment into the site,
projects, and overall would decrease the number of fees collected. So it ain't
happening.

------
mentos
> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem.

I'd say its a pricing problem.

Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at
$20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for
$0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ?

You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal
price.

I think the industry should do what Hulu has done over the past 5 years. Give
the product away virtually for free, collect an enormous user base while you
starve/kill the demand for the equivalent torrents, slowly increase the price
of the service until you find equilibrium, then profit.

But hey, maybe piracy isn't really a problem? The greatest assumption people
make is that because someone downloaded a movie illegally they were willing to
buy it for $20. Which is false. I'd have to imagine that selling 'The Wolf of
Wall Street' for $20 on Amazon is more profitable than selling it for say $19
and capturing a few pirate consumers.

But I wonder if theres a number between $0 and $19 that captures enough of the
piraters to be more profitable than $20?

~~~
secstate
LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users'
faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to
free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious
question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your
cable/satellite company (we'll come back to the "theoretically" in a moment):
watch new shows the day after they aired, as many as you want. _Plus_ a lot of
back catalog stuff, _plus_ weird independent stuff that they bring in. Not for
cable or satellite prices of $100+ a month (and that's not counting "premium"
channels like HBO), not even for the promotional special prices of ~$30 a
month, but for $7.99 a month, and with about half as many ads, given that
Hulu's breaks are 60-90 seconds instead of 2-4 minutes.

I don't know. On the surface, isn't that kind of an amazing improvement?

Coming back to the "theoretically," the problems I see with Hulu are certainly
driven by stupid contractual obligations: they usually only have the last five
episodes of any given series, so if you want to start watching something
halfway through the season you're out of luck; they sometimes don't have
rights to stream things on Hulu Plus that they do on _normal_ Hulu, which is
banana crazypants; and of course, there are shows and even whole networks they
don't carry. But out of all the issues with Hulu, I'm not sure their failure
to give us everything commercial free is actually that outrageous.

~~~
nitrogen
Hulu's breaks are steadily increasing in length. First it was 30s, then
45-60s, now it's typically 120-145s. I avoid Hulu now if there's any other way
to watch a show.

~~~
wlesieutre
Is it still the same ad played over and over during the same break? Just 8
times now instead of 4?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
No, they're up to three different ads. It's just that it's the same three ads
every break. :)

~~~
wlesieutre
Hey, it's an improvement. Last time I used Hulu (admittedly a while ago) it
was "T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE. It goes fast like
this pink motorcycle! T-MOBILE."

------
fjcaetano
It doesn't matter. The code is already out there.

Respectfully, I think the authors didn't think much and were kinda dumb. The
project had a great potential, it was barely legal, they bought a fight with
the media industry, but the cherry-on-top is that they putted their asses on
the line. They shouldn't have used their real names. Anonymise your accounts
and be happy.

But as I said, it doesn't matter. Everyone already has a fork of their repo
(which has over 70 open pull-requests) and any one of these forks may become
the new "official". It won't stop. The gears are already running, much like
bitcoin. Fortunately.

~~~
slang800
As you predicted, it looks like the new "official" repo is here:
[https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app](https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app)
and people have already begun work on getting it working again.

~~~
cettox
I was unaware of that repo yet, it took me 1 hour to get it working though
some features was disabled : [https://github.com/cettox/popcorn-
app](https://github.com/cettox/popcorn-app) and for precompiled executables
visit [http://kemald.com/pt/popcorn.html](http://kemald.com/pt/popcorn.html)

~~~
mkremer90
This seems to quit immediately for me in Mac :(

~~~
cettox
Others already reported problems in mac, yet I am unable to debug it for mac
currently.

~~~
balladeer
For me it just keeps on Buffering viewo..downloading..and then keeps on doing
that. I had the same problem with the official version too. The longest I've
checked is ~60 minutes and it was right there where it started.

However, for the same file of 1.5GB it took me ~10 mins to download. (Mac)

------
programminggeek
Did anyone believe that Popcorn Time was going to end any other way than this?

Either they were going to be shut down by their own choice, or their hand
would be forced by outside litigation. Just because something is legal doesn't
mean companies won't spend millions of dollars to make your life miserable
because of what you built.

~~~
User8712
Is it surprising that an appication used to stream torrents, is primarily used
for piracy? No, no it's not, and this is why I'm scratching my head. They knew
from day one, before they wrote a single line of code that the application
would be used for pirating movies. For this reason, I assumed they had a plan,
because surely no sane development team would put forth the time to setup this
project, and then act surprised at the first legal threat, and close up shop.

~~~
dmur
I'm not sure surprised is the word I'd use to describe their sentiment. I'd
guess rather that they originally _planned_ to back down at the first sign of
legal threats. Popcorn Time has been circulated as an experiment, not a
business, and in that sense it was a success. Also, the code isn't going
anywhere, so it's not as if all this work was for nothing.

~~~
chris123
Where is the code being hosted now?

------
galapago
There is an encrypted message [1] in the last commit of their website
(popcorn-time.github.io).

[1] [https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
time.github.io/commi...](https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
time.github.io/commit/d0a39b7f04bf8e6ceb1c41fa0b74a10e267beb92)

~~~
Zancarius
It just occurred to me. It's probably _completely unlikely_ , so I'll put my
tinfoil hat on for a moment...

What is the possibility that Github was DDoSed by agents working in or for the
movie industry because of Popcorn Time, attempting to either disrupt
development or access?

I know, I know. It's outrageous. Unlikely. Crazy, even. But to say I'd be
surprised this day and age would be a bit of an overstatement...

~~~
shitlord
The movie/recording industry has actually been known to use DDOS attacks.
IIRC, they hired a company in India to launch a DDOS against some cyberlocker,
which prompted Operation Payback.

~~~
svenkatesh
That sounds interesting. Do you have a link to more information?

~~~
PhearTheCeal
[http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/movie-industry-
launch...](http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/movie-industry-launching-
cyber-attacks-on-pirate-websites-715149)

[http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-tries-to-erase-
hi...](http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-tries-to-erase-
history-111015/)

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111014/02583316350/confus...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111014/02583316350/confused-
indian-anti-piracy-group-asks-us-to-remove-article-it-doesnt-like-some-other-
blog.shtml)

------
User8712
Well, this is disappointing. It seemed like a nicely designed application,
with an enthusiastic development team behind it. And now, within days, it's
gone.

If they wanted to avoid piracy, I think it might have had some potential going
the legal route as well. It would be a nice interface to browse legal movies,
documentaries, web series, etc.

Strange decision, I could see a company like Netflix buying them out for a
rather large sum of money, within a short period of time.

As far as using it as a stepping stone to future jobs, why wouldn't they run
the application longer? They pulled the plug before it became a widespread
success. It they waited longer, the name Popcorn Time would actually be
recognizable, which would be great for their résumé, kind of like saying you
developed Napster. Now, they'll mention they worked on Popcorn Time, and have
to explain to everyone it was an app to stream torrents, that had a brief
shelf life.

They really should have road this out longer. Even the name was catchy.
Someone else is going to fork the project and achieve the success they would
have earned.

~~~
lucb1e
> I could see a company like Netflix buying them out

Really? I think Netflix would "suddenly" have each and every contract broken
and no content can be watched on Netflix services ever again.

Well, with the exception of anything that runs on Popcorn, of course.

~~~
User8712
I never said Netflix would continue to run the application and let people
stream illegal content. Let's break this down.

First off, it's a perfect fit. The Popcorn Time audience streams the latest
movies and tv series. This is exactly the audience Netflix wants to target.

Popcorn Time hitting 100 million users doesn't seem far fetched. Netflix pays
around $16 for each user that you refer to their free trial. Let's say Netflix
buys Popcorn Time, converts it to movies that are in the public domain, and
tries to refer everyone to the Netflix trial to continue streaming new films.
We'll say 99% of people leave, and 1% take up the trial. That's 1 million
trial users, which Netflix would currently pay 16 million dollars for in
referral fees.

In short, it could easily grow into an application worth tens of millions to a
company like Netflix.

The movie industry would love it. Netflix destroys the most popular service
for illegally streaming movies, and they make some money off the Netflix
subscribers.

If someone makes a successful fork, maybe we'll see this happen.

------
leot
It's better that the Popcorn Time developers leave now than later. By leaving
now they can take advantage of all the attention and get a great fork going.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Probably what their initial intention was from the beginning.

1) Build something incredible.

2) Get a ton of cred for it.

3) Release it to the masses via open source.

4) Wait for the lawyers to roll up en masse.

Then simply flee the scene, avoiding any legal entanglements and with
steadfast assurances what you've created will now go on without you, and most
likely morph into something even more incredible.

Genius I tell you, genius.

~~~
badman_ting
Interesting! Hadn't thought of that, but it's pretty clever if it is indeed
what they're up to.

~~~
zanny
It is becoming a very viable strategy in the "questionable derivative works"
scene to open source the assets before a release in case you are C&D'd.

It is wonderful how the Internet makes it hard to suppress information.

------
drawkbox
Sadly, existing then shutting down so fast will only hurt the whole reason
they set out. Lawyers and middle men are licking their chops and toasting
champagne and caviar dreams at the idea of such fast work on their part.

It did prove once again that demand for easy services is desired but lots of
that were also because it was free.

~~~
tricolon
Why would lawyers be toasting champagne? They could have made money from a
lawsuit.

~~~
drawkbox
Proof that their intimidation 'services' work will sell more intimidation
services.

~~~
chii
good riddance to those people who would then pay for said intimidation
service, the find out that it doesn't actually work.

------
MikeTaylor
I wonder what will happen to the code-base. It's pretty hard to make an
application go away when there are many checkouts of its git module around the
world.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I'm absolutely certain it'll get forked and live on under different
maintainers.

~~~
sorahn
Yeah, the service works. I know that I forked a copy just in case.

------
amirouche
Of course, they received money. So much coverage and stop it here? Who would
believe that they are honest? As if the guy who invented torrent stopped
working on torrent...

There is a standard for this techno, it's called PPSP [1] it covers both
"free" network (with a DHT tracker) and controlled networks (the one required
for distributing protected content). There is even an free software that is
based on it [2] and a c++ library [3]. It is was developed during P2PNext [4].
During this research some one achieved sub-second DHT lookup and now works at
Spotify.

If you are interested in the subject of P2P maybe "P2P virtual network" or
"second life P2P" search might interest you.

My interest is for the time being a graph database over a DHT. I am at the
very early stage in terms of code. But maybe this might give you an idea of
what I'm looking for [5].

[1] [http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ppsp/](http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ppsp/) [2]
[http://www.tribler.org/trac](http://www.tribler.org/trac) [3]
[http://libswift.org/](http://libswift.org/) [4]
[http://p2pnext.eu/](http://p2pnext.eu/) [5]
[https://github.com/amirouche/no](https://github.com/amirouche/no)

~~~
j_s
Can not access the /no repo - maybe it's still private? Sounds interesting!

~~~
amirouche
It's offline actually, I deleted my github account because of recent events at
github.

Since you ask...

3rd iteration: It already took me too much time to write this comment.

The code is really not interesting, the implementation of nolang is broken, I
did not find time to debug it, not only "I want to do too much things at once"
syndrom but I also wanted to mock the idea of some part of the "final" app, in
a browser and apply it in the context of Culture&Empire to reach potential
dev/users. Since the web is not my primary target, it doesn't really matter in
any way but there's still valuable (to me) ideas in the app. This is the most
exciting thing that I ever had in mind. It might sound also kind of naive:
instead of pushing Pythonium forward and getting a Python framework similar to
meteor or derbyjs I will do "no".

[https://bitbucket.org/amirouche/no-no-more-
updates](https://bitbucket.org/amirouche/no-no-more-updates)

The primary application I will build on top of "no" will be something like the
venerable delicious bookmark website.

As far as I can think, I would like to be able to boot a computer to be a "no"
node with the very minimum. Code & Data will live primarily in the DHT.

[0] The following link is lying. the exact definition of the compliant mode is
"wanna be compliant" or "can be compliant"

[1]
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pythonium](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pythonium)
[2]

[2] As a Python dev (with JS knowledge), I really like the veloce mode...
veloce mode generates perfect javascript code ie. with no overhead. The
overhead of compliant mode is between 100 and 10 i don't remember correctly
(based on pystones.py).

------
irunbackwards
Anyone interested in the app can still build it from their repo.

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

~~~
equalarrow
If I wasn't on Comcast I would try this out..

I've had to resort to a lower-tech approach:

* Rent a cheap server * Run transmission daemon on it * SSH into server, port forward 9091 * Connect to localhost:9091 and add torrents that way * When downloads are done, scp them off to my local network

Con: way too many steps involved Pro: encrypted to/from my local network

I know this is not nearly the same as Popcorn Time, but it would be nice to
automate all this.

~~~
icebraining
I have a similar setup, but I've automated a few more steps.

I have couchpotato[1] running on my VPS. When I add a movie to it, it'll find
and drop the torrent file to a directory, where rtorrent will pick it up and
immediately start downloading it. When it finishes, it moves the files to a
temporary directory, where couchpotato will detect them, rename them and move
them to yet another directory, where Git Annex Assistant[2] will add them to
its store and sync to a Raspberry Pi in my home through SSH/rsync.

Then I can either copy the file to my laptop or Android by doing "git annex
get <file>" or stream it from the Samba server running on the Pi.

Complicated to setup initially, yes, but now it runs smoothly with almost no
manual work.

[1] [https://couchpota.to/](https://couchpota.to/)

[2] [https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/](https://git-
annex.branchable.com/assistant/)

~~~
The_Double
What is the advantage of this compared to just running everything on the pi?

~~~
icebraining
Well, I like to keep decent ratios (usually 3), which would keep my asymmetric
home connection too busy - whereas my cheap VPS can do 1Gpbs (burst). And in
my experience, the Pi doesn't handle well heavy random IO over the
USB/ethernet bus - I had downloads with 20-40% of blocks corrupted upon
verification.

And of course, while I don't consider it a problem where I live, removing the
torrenting from your connection to a VPS in the Netherlands reduces the
chances of having legal problems.

And the VPS isn't a dedicated seedbox - I'd still use it for my email server
(Spamhaus' PBL prevents me from sending from my home connection), Tiny Tiny
RSS hosting, website hosting, etc.

------
j_baker
> Popcorn Time as a project is legal. We checked.

The law isn't quite so black and white. There are a lot of different theories
good lawyers can come up with. At the end of the day, the only thing that's
legal is what a court says is legal.

~~~
oscargrouch
The law and force works so the powerful people can maintain their power, the
rich their fortune, and sometime they hang someone so the crowd can be happy,
and think the law works.. also.. it eventually locks up marginalized people
that dont work in the gears of the big machine.. if you ask them, they will
deny it.. and tell what you want to hear.. and you go on with you miserable
life..

Kafka my friend.. was there first.. saw it, told us

~~~
chii
my friend, what you have just described is society. This is why everyone has
to step on everyone else to lift themselves up, out of fear of becoming one of
those marginalized people.

------
notdonspaulding
Here's what I don't understand. I pay Netflix $8/month to stream movies and TV
shows in HD. From that $8 Netflix has to pay their hosting expenses, maintain
a profit margin, and pay licensing fees to Hollywood.

Now a technology comes along that in several ways delivers a _better service
than Netflix_ to consumers, for absolutely no cost to Hollywood. Is there any
reason Hollywood shouldn't just release content to torrents, and sell an
unlimited license for $8, $16, $24, or ?? a month to consumers living in
countries which respect intellectual property?

I would gladly pay some amount of money to the content creators if it would
buy me Popcorn-time service in a legal manner. I would say the _vast majority_
of Americans are in this boat. They want the service that Popcorn Time used to
provide, and they'll pay a price for it. It makes absolutely no sense to me
that Hollywood hasn't figured out how to make an absolute killing off of this
free infrastructure by merely selling legal amnesty in the form of bittorrent-
streaming licenses.

~~~
rahimnathwani
'Hollywood' isn't a single entity. Someone would need to:

\- Set this monthly fee

\- Work out a way to share the fee among content creators, and get that agreed
by those content creators

\- Get the data required to support the fee-sharing agreement (e.g. movie
plays)

\- Protect the revenues through, e.g. legal action against those who use the
service without paying, and providing a payment mechanism for everyone else

Think about it from the point of view of an individual content creator. If I
were to create the best movie ever, and wanted to maximise my revenue from the
money/sweat/risk I put in to get this far, what kind of revenue sharing model
would need to exist, in order to persuade me to make the movie available on a
service like the one you describe?

------
izzydata
I'd pay 1-5 dollars for a digital download to a video file that I can move and
put on anything I own in any way that I want. I won't pay 20-40 dollars for a
video I can watch in very limited ways or is a physical disk. It is just too
inconvenient to be worth it. There is also a consistency problem. I want
everything to be from the same source or in the same format.

------
plg
We need someone rich and powerful to champion this cause, to put their name,
influence, reputation behind it. We need an Elon Musk or a Mark Zuckerburg to
just do it, and say go ahead, try suing me, I am going to change the system.

~~~
mixologic
Elon Musk is busy trying to change the way cars are sold to the public. And he
just lost a battle in New Jersey.

------
Lambdanaut
Time to fork and continue development.

~~~
slang800
Exactly! :D The fork has already begun here:
[https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app](https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app)

~~~
kalmi10
If you dump the content of this repo into "%APPDATA%\Popcorn Time\app", the
app starts working again without having to do any compiling.

------
theschwa
I find it interesting that this is essentially a web app front end, made with
backbone.js, for the node module peerflix, but peerflix hasn't received any
heat.

It seems to me their only "fault" was making things too convenient.

~~~
wmf
That's the flip side of "it's a service problem". Hollywood only cares if you
make infringing more convenient than buying.

------
usaphp
I don't understand why it got so much attention, it looks just like a ripoff
from zona.ru, even the frontend website looks similar. And zona has been out
there for quite some time already.

------
tzaman
Is it just me or is there something they aren't telling us?

~~~
zanny
We can infer that any developer in the US or any real buddy-buddy country with
the US probably had police at their door. Yea, they didn't break a law, but
the police aren't for law enforcement really.

They also probably got a few thousand notices they would be taken to court.

Their entire goal worked, though - make the app in private, have it blow up,
and since the code is FOSS now thousands of people have it and it won't die.
Forks can spring up and improve on it just fine - hell, the original
developers can work on it still under someone elses repo - but they aren't
liable for anything.

------
baxter001
A nice wrapper around something like btcat:
[http://jordic.com/btcat/btcat](http://jordic.com/btcat/btcat) is all that's
really needed, a great part of popcorn time was purely in the marketing and
presentation, the technology is relatively straight forwards.

Now it's clear there's a demand for similar tools this isn't a tide that can
be stopped.

------
Jugurtha
There's a saying that goes : Don't buy fish in the ocean.

Studios and all assume that people are thieves.

There are a number of cases to think of:

Tim Ferriss teamed with.. BitTorrent to distribute his latest book (4 Hour
Chef). He wrote a detailed article on his experience and the correlation
between BitTorrent downloads and sales (number driven he is, he tracked that
real-time).

The model was the second-shareware model of early DOS games (you get part of
the content, and if you like it, you buy the rest). And people bought it.
There was an ad on BitTorrent clients. I haven't bought the book yet, but I
haven't even downloaded the free content since I'm saving the thing for later.

There was Radiohead releasing "In Rainbows" as a "Pay what you want" which is
extremely risky (since you're giving all the content). And yet, I'll let the
reader look up the numbers (it ended being pretty lucrative, since a lot of
people pre-ordered it).

Studios and Publishers seem to forget that a lot of human beings would pay if
it were easy. One of the reasons I got a MasterCard recently is to pay for
books I've read. I live in a country where English isn't spoken, so there's no
way I can find them in libraries, I tried to buy on Amazon, they told me they
can't ship it where I live.

Second: It's ridiculous to expect of me to buy a movie I haven't watched, or a
book I haven't read.

Bear in mind that even with content so easily to be pirated, _most_ movies,
and I mean like 99% of them, I wouldn't waste bandwidth to download them. I
swear that I wouldn't even watch them if I were paid. Why ? Because a movie is
1h30 to 2h minimum and my life is made of hours and minutes and seconds. I
don't like to waste my time. It's not like I'm immortal.

So most movies are crap to being with, not everyone is De Niro.

An other reason: Content is hardly accessible the legal way because their
platforms suck big time. I give an example ?

Say there's an interview on NBC or CNN (though free).. I wouldn't watch it on
CNN or NBC, because their site is so slow, their players are _horrible_ you
want to punch your laptop. So I go to Youtube and find that video and watch it
without a glitch.

So I wouldn't even watch free content on the platform of the provider of this
free content, because his platform sucks !

If your website is straining someone's computer's resources and making the fan
go crazy, you got to ask yourself tough questions (and probably fire some
people).

I gladly pay for things. I donate on random websites just because I want to,
or because I liked something, or because they had a funny thing, etc.

~~~
Springtime
> Second: It's ridiculous to expect of me to buy a movie I haven't watched, or
> a book I haven't read.

I've heard this argument many times before, but don't buy it (no pun
intended).

There are enough professional and user reviews, video clips, etc of everything
for sale online that anyone can make an informed decision on whether the
product is likely to be something they'll enjoy.

Why not take advantage of all these great online sources? If many films, for
example, haven't suited your taste it may be more valuable spending some time
on sites that help you find films more to your taste, and
reading/watching/listening to user opinions that are more in line with your
own.

That said, I do prefer music services that allow the user to preview tracks
prior to purchase. Even Youtube has become a popular platform for previewing
content. Seems reasonable for such a type of short-form media.

As for accessibility, companies do need to provide better and more open
support for customers to consume their content. It's come a long way though,
and hopefully it becomes even more consumer-focused in the future.

~~~
Jugurtha
>There are enough professional and user reviews, video clips, etc of
everything for sale online that anyone can make an informed decision on
whether the product is likely to be something they'll enjoy.

Most people have bad taste, or are fan-boys. I didn't like "The Batman Rises".
Yes, it's Nolan. The extra (actors) were aweful (some of them were laughing in
fighting scenes). The scenes where there was a riot, I've seen extras punch
the air, etc. Sometimes, Batman wouldn't even hit somebody for them to fall,
or worst, hit someone and someone else falls(scene where he gets attacked by a
group at night). This is sloppy. Not to mention that the fighting scenes are
basically the guys lining up to get their arse handled to them. Why don't you
use your gun and shoot the little bat ?

Just weak.

There are tons of movies that are basically a pump and dump scheme. They go
heavy, all the way marketing and amping it before the release... Not to
mention include scenes in the trailer that aren't even in the final movie. And
then release and try to make a killing the first days, because they probably
know people will realize it's a shitty movie.

The rest is DVD's, etc..

How many actors can you say are great ? How many screen-writers write really
well ? How long have you not seen a movie as The Godfather ?

Extend that to music, too .. How many artists there are, really ? Most music
is junk, it sounds exactly the same and you wouldn't be able to make a
difference between two tracks (and I have a good musical ear, I mean, I can
sometimes recognize a song playing in somone's headphones by its beat).

Furthermore, a lot of "artists" look the frigging same. Lyrics ? Where are the
Queens ? And I'm not biased.

Recently, I watched a video of Miley Cyrus a friend was watching. The video
was "Jolene". I was speechless and said "Wow ! This song is great". I mean,
the lyrics of it. It's vulnerable, etc. It moved me.

And then I said "My God, this song seems coming straight out from the 70's".
The tempo, the style, etc.. I listened to it repeatedly. Until I realized that
it actually _is_ a 70's song by Dolly Parton (I didn't know her, sorry).

Point is: Good music isn't bound by time. People still listen to The Stones
and watch The Godfather.

How many will still listen to the fad music and movies coming out ?

This is the same with books. Pump and dump. Most books I was reading, I'd skim
through and then throw it because it's junk. The point is that it would take
me more making sure the content is good before buying it (searching reviews of
people who aren't me, possibly biased by the author, fans, haters, affiliates)
than actually judging by myself (which is done quickly).

~~~
jasondemeuse
>How many actors can you say are great ? How many screen-writers write really
well ? How long have you not seen a movie as The Godfather ? Extend that to
music, too .. How many artists there are, really ? Most music is junk, it
sounds exactly the same and you wouldn't be able to make a difference between
two tracks (and I have a good musical ear, I mean, I can sometimes recognize a
song playing in somone's headphones by its beat). Furthermore, a lot of
"artists" look the frigging same. Lyrics ? Where are the Queens ? And I'm not
biased.

I'm sorry but this is a load of bull and it's a sentiment that people have
been relaying for centuries and it's always ignorant. "This generation's _____
lacks substance but look at ____ and ____ from the past generation and how
great it was!"

You can look back on any time period and point out the best of entertainment,
just like you can pick out the worst. There was as many awful actors, movies
and music when the Godfather was released as there is now, and there is just
as much great entertainment being put out right now.

Just because YOU haven't looked past top-40 music and the most popular movies
doesn't mean great ones don't exist, and just because YOU only point out the
highlights of past entertainment doesn't mean the shitty stuff went away.

This is a ridiculous way of thinking.

~~~
Jugurtha
You're making interesting assumptions about myself. I speak 5 languages
fluently; trust me I watch movies, shows, pieces from many, many countries.
(I'm not a native English speaker).

This is valid for my tastes in music, painting, books(I've been raised with
classic french litterature, but read stuff from all over the world).

(I find it amusing when I see hipsters saying they're "eclectic", yet all
their bands sing in English..)

So I understand your assumption that "most" people are spot on top of a
Gaussian distribution, listen to popular music, watch popular movies.. People
do what other people do. I simply not. Not because I'm contrarian (although
this can prove useful in this era), but simply because I have a delicate taste
and been exposed to many nice things to spoil my senses.

Furthermore, my words have been distorted. There are many young actors and
singers I appreciate a great deal.

PS: You can't deny that the number of cool movies has "sort of decreased".
When you see the sequel of a movie like 300, and sequels for everything.. I've
watched so many movies that I can tell how a movie will go and I'll be
disturbingly close. Heck at one time I unraveled the plot of a movie my friend
was watching while I was almost asleep and only listening to audio. Good
writers, we need more of those.

------
cottonseed
I thought it was a desktop app that used 3rd party torrent movie search APIs
(YIFI, OpenSubtitles, etc.) to stream torrents. How does a desktop app "shut
down"? I must be misunderstanding part of the architecture. Did they have a
centralized server? What did they use it for?

I know they took the down the download link. People are reporting the app no
longer works.

~~~
hadrien01
They used the [http://subapi.com/](http://subapi.com/) website as a gateway
between their app and [http://yts.re/api](http://yts.re/api). You can browse
precedent commits to check the previous code, which is what I'm doing now.

~~~
fenghorn
Popcorn Time 0.1.0 depends on subapi.com to continue functioning. Based on the
source the API returns JSON file with the following structure: { movies: { [
torrents: [ {'quality': '1080p', url:
'[http://url.torrent'](http://url.torrent')}, {'quality': '720p', url:
'[http://url.torrent'](http://url.torrent')}, {'quality': 'undefined', url:
'[http://url.torrent'](http://url.torrent')} ], subtitles: [ {'language':
'en', url: '[http://url.srt'](http://url.srt')}, {'language': 'undefined',
url: '[http://url.srt'](http://url.srt')} ], imdb_id:, title:, year:,
runtime:, synopsis:, voteAverage:, poster:, backdrop:, seeders:, leechers: ] }
}

------
f47h3r
Don't worry, YIFI is on it...

[http://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-shuts-down-then-gets-
re...](http://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-shuts-down-then-gets-resurrected-
by-yts-yify-140315/)

 _edit_ Link to new github repo for YIFY:

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

------
darksim905
Nobody has a god damn spine in the tech world. These guys could've stood up &
been different - the fact they shut down shortly after being featured on here,
Reddit & other large websites shows that they weren't passionate at all &
weren't willing to standup for their users at all. Ridiculous.

~~~
spada
I owned a site that was targeted by the MPAA. I don't think you understand
just how intense that can be. it's hardly a C&D letter.

~~~
nawitus
That's interesting. Any chance you could be more specific?

------
gcv
Could this have been the intent all along? Make a decent first cut of the
code, generate a ton of publicity, then generate a ton _more_ publicity — note
the vagueness about why exactly they shut down — then leave the code in
reasonable working order up on GitHub. Now a thousand hard-to-shutdown forks
will bloom.

------
jrochkind1
> _Popcorn Time as a project is legal. We checked. Four Times._

What the heck does that mean? Four times, eh? You mean you asked four
different lawyers? You asked the same lawyer four times? You got sued four
times and won? (Obviously not). You 'checked' by googling around for legal
information... four times? You asked your cousin who took a class on copyright
once? Four cousins? You emailed the MPAA... four times?

I don't think the law works like you think it works.

> _Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and
> copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in
> danger for doing what we love. And that’s not a battle we want a place in._

So, if after your 'four times checking', it still caught you by surprise that
there'd be debates and legal threats... I don't think you were checking in the
right places.

------
Noxchi
I was trying to use Popcorn yesterday and it just plain sucked. I then
installed XBMC and XBMCTorrent plugin, and everything was buttery smooth.

Popcorn is built on A LOT of immature technology, which makes it very slow.
XBMCtorrent on the other hand uses mature, tested, compiled libraries and
platforms.

------
ialex
Hey this is not the end, it is an opportunity to sell this technology to some
company that has problems streaming video PopCorn Time is just the proof that
it works and it can be used to solve real world problems. So i hope you find a
successful exit.

------
gulbrandr
The best part:

 _We’ve shown that people will risk fines, lawsuits and whatever consequences
that may come just to be able to watch a recent movie in slippers. Just to get
the kind of experience they deserve.

And maybe, that asking nicely for a few bucks a month to watch whichever movie
you want is a bit better than that.

Popcorn Time is shutting down today. Not because we ran out of energy,
commitment, focus or allies. But because we need to move on with our lives.

Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and
copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger
for doing what we love. And that’s not a battle we want a place in._

------
api
I've scanned this whole thread and there's not a single post that is at all
critical of the intentions behind Popcorn Time. I guess you're all okay with a
world where content creators don't eat.

Or do you have a better idea than copyright? If so, by all means let's hear
it. I promise you that the person who solves that problem in an accessible way
will be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least Tim Berners-Lee. Every single
artist, musician, movie studio, and producer in the world will beat a path to
your door, frantically scrambling for their checkbooks and trembling as they
hover over a check with the pen asking "how much?!? how much!??" They will
break into your house and shove cash down your throat while you sleep.

I know a good number of writers, artists, and musicians. Do any of you six-
figure-earners have _any_ idea how insanely hard it is to even make a living
doing anything "creative?" I mean a basic living: food, shelter, occasional
transportation. Nothing infuriates these people more than clueless techies
with (to them) _unimaginable_ earning power braying on about how they should
live off charity or touring revenues so "information can be free." _You try
it_ , and no open source does not count. Open source is a resume item that
helps you land your next six-figure gig, not to mention the fact that it can
be monetized in other ways... ways that unlike tip jars actually work.
(Services, training, dual-licensing, etc.)

Oh sure, yeah, the record industries and Hollywood make more than the artists.
Everyone knows that. In the past, the record company or the studio made most
of the money and the artist got too little. But now with piracy the artist
gets _zero_. Is that a step in the right direction? We've gone from artists
having to suck up to shady promoters to artists not even having shady
promoters to suck up to.

Why is there so much crappy music on the radio? Because the people who like it
are either too young or too dumb to pirate it.

And this is coming from someone who's written peer to peer apps. I am pretty
liberal in this area. I do not believe a technology should be interfered with
just because it could potentially be used for piracy. If we did that, we'd
have to shut down the whole Internet. But there's a difference between
designing an app that _can_ be used for piracy and designing one whose entire
focus and modus operandi is to promote piracy front and center. It may not be
illegal but it's a dick move. Let's see you work for "voluntary
contributions," assholes.

To add douche to the nozzle, there's people in here congratulating the Popcorn
Time authors on how brilliant they are by leveraging this for publicity.
That's wonderful. Now these folks who did little more than hack together some
node.js scripts with a front end will go out and make well above $100k while
musicians struggle to pay rent for tiny closets in the ghetto. So the MPAA
might have harassed them. Boo hoo. Go blow your nose into your hordes of cash.

Maybe the end of copyright as we know it is technologically inevitable. But in
the meantime it shows more than a little bit of ignorance, naiveté, and
douchebaggery to congratulate each other on destroying peoples' livelihoods en
masse. Maybe instead all you hackers could bend your considerable intellects
toward trying to solve this problem in a productive way that actually helps
creators get paid while also making it easy for people to enjoy their work.
You'd be loved, not to mention wealthy and historically legendary.

~~~
zanny
> Or do you have a better idea than copyright?

Capitalism. Pay for scarce goods and services on an open market. Since movies
/ music / etc are digital, and that is a number, and numbers are information,
you don't restrict information. Instead, you let the free market handle it -
in the absence of copyright, people _still_ want movies, and music, and new
creative feats. And those creators want to live off of creating their works.

Hint: keyword is creating.

So as a creator you come before the masses and say "I want to make X, but I
need to eat to do so, and you want X, so let us have a mutually beneficial
voluntary exchange and I'll make it".

The only other thing you need is some kind of restitution system (I think) to
artificially increase confidence in creators, or you end up with a reputation
based insular ecosystem of the first few to meet the demand finding all the
investment. It could be through investor like protection for failed projects,
or it could be some program where the state provides you some stipend to
attempt creative endeavors and they can deal with the arbitrage over failed
works.

Regardless of how you go about it, the concept is the same - stop the
doublethink. Information isn't scarce. In the past, making it more scarce had
value because it was still somewhat scarce. Today, information is no longer
scarce. I have the means to transmit lifetimes worth of information in months
/ weeks / days / hours / minutes / seconds depending on your connection
speeds. And I think there is something fundamentally different between the
inception of copyright (make scarce information slightly more scarce to
promote its creation because its creators have to endure the upfront costs of
infrastructure to account for the medium scarcity of the end product) and
modern information (which isn't scarce, has no investment costs besides the
scarce resources that go into creating an original instance of it, and has no
deployment expenses).

This doesn't happen today because the short term demand for information
creation is satiated by media purchase, because funding new open media would
be a long term purchase. So when people have to choose between new media now
or new media later, they bend over for copyright. If their choice was free
media now and paying for the media they want to see made later, there wouldn't
be a choice, and all that capital would (mostly _)flow to content creators.

_ : yes, it is likely in the absence of an artificial market propped up by
copyright that, due to subliminal mental effects of marketing and appeal, and
the fact hairless monkeys don't make entirely rational purchasing decisions,
some of those funds would be redirected towards other immediate scarce goods
and services rather than potential future information creation. That only
reflects how bad our current system is, though - it means people overspend on
media because of the existence of copyright, not through rational process, but
because they are manipulated into redistributing their funds through
manipulation.

If you want an example of this system, look at the gooseberry movie project.
Exactly how the future should be.

[http://gooseberry.blender.org/](http://gooseberry.blender.org/)

~~~
adsr
What about FOSS licenses, anyone can simply ignore what for example GPL says
and do as they please with the code without copyright. There is simply no case
there to fight if it were to happen.

~~~
zanny
But it would also mean they couldn't control the compiled binaries. It takes
the profit motive out of software development - you just have to be vigilant
enough to make sure you can retrace the source of the software you use.

I'm one of the people that uses the GPL because copyright exists. Without
copyright, companies lose the incentive to close their source, because the
binaries aren't restrictable anyway so they can't profit off that. It just
means they shoot themselves in the foot by not showing the source to others
for auditing purposes. It would also mean decompiling binaries would be
perfectly legal, and distributing the results of that would be legal too.

I'd rather live in a world where nobody can tell you how to distribute
information than one where I can try (and personally wouldn't be able to fight
jack in court enforcing it without the FSF's help) to force openness on others
for the sake of freedom while international companies profiteer off artificial
scarcity.

~~~
adsr
On the contrary I think that's an even higher incentive to close source,
obfuscate binaries and add DRM etc. And while someone may be able to copy the
binary, they can not create derivative work from it.

It's still going to be a fight, but it will be fought outside of the court
rooms without support of the law. To me that sounds like a step backwards,
because even more than today that's a fight where a resource heavy megacorp
will have an upper hand.

I don't like the idea of someone that creates something great without
compensation, put it out for free, only to have the work taken by some large
corporation that manages to profit from the work due to large marketing
budgets, sales channels and existing customers, while the author remains
uncompensated. So it's not an incentive to open source and share personal
projects either.

~~~
zanny
> they can not create derivative work from it.

You can easily decompile it, and without copyright nobody can tell you want
you are allowed to do with it.

> only to have the work taken by some large corporation that manages to profit
> from the work due to large marketing budgets, sales channels and existing
> customers, while the author remains uncompensated

How would you profit from the work if you can't "sell" the work? At best they
could seek funding to create derivatives of the work. But this does point out
a major reason copyright is broken now - in how many other disciplines do you
expect compensation for finite effort for infinite time? It should be that
your finite work is compensated for finite money during a fixed time period
(in my examples, the development of the work).

I'd like to think you could extend plagiarism in the absence of copyright to
cover all ideas - ie, you can freely modify, reproduce, or redistribute a
work, as long as you aren't falsely claiming it as your own, and upon inquiry
you truthfully say where it came from. That is peripheral to actual
interactions with information, it is about how you present yourself in
relation to them.

~~~
adsr
> You can easily decompile it, and without copyright nobody can tell you want
> you are allowed to do with it.

Easy to decompile, is not the same as easy to deobfuscate, understand and
create deriviative work from. The entire point of GPL or any license is to
tell what's allowed to do, that means you _can_ share source code, and have
legal means backing you up.

> How would you profit from the work if you can't "sell" the work?

You are the one who say that you can not sell the work. Of course you can, but
it may not be relevant to the question of profits here since we are talking
about source code, it may be incorporated in an existing system or service or
even in a hardware product just to give some examples.

> in how many other disciplines do you expect compensation for finite effort
> for infinite time?

It's not infinite, it is restricted to a finite time. You do not get
compensation unless you sell a product, selling that product it self takes
work and investments. The amount you get paid, and if there are any reoccuring
payments depends on the terms you are able to negotiate with who ever it is
you sell to. It has nothing to do with copyright.

------
mncolinlee
It's deeply frustrating that Bittorrent is still synonymous with piracy just
like MP3 was in the 1990s. It's simply a protocol. One may use a technology
like this for very good purposes, including independent film distribution.
When I worked at Pearson, we could not convince network personnel to allow
corporate Bittorrent for media content distribution to international sites
because they were afraid auditors would balk at it for its connotations. It
was clearly the best technology for the job and auditors have accepted it for
similar uses at companies like Ebay and Paypal.

------
whatshaup
You know what really grinds my gears? You actually give so much credit to
Popcorn Time for "inventing" something that the damn europeans have for a
thousand years...OK, maybe for americans is Heaven on earth cause they pay for
damn everything but it's not like they invented fire! It's the same story as
Twitter in Europe. Everyone thought it's just another social network, then it
moves to US and BOOM. I should start "porting" some ideas then cause you just
proved a point I have for 8 years now.

------
baby
I thought it was decentralized enough that you just needed the software for
the job. Seems like it used a centralized point since I can't use it now.

------
cantbecool
I was hoping this service was going to take off. I created something similar,
a simple movie torrent search engine:
[http://www.moviemagnet.net](http://www.moviemagnet.net) I hope people are not
discouraged by Popcorn's exit, since torrent based applications should force
the issue, old media companies to change their archaic distribution models.

------
GBiT
Goodbye Popcorn Time, hello Popcorn app -
[https://github.com/yify](https://github.com/yify)

------
GigabyteCoin
I don't understand. I thought Popcorn Time was FOSS with it's source on GitHub
that downloaded all it's data from external APIs.

How can it possibly just "say goodbye"?

Is this the main developers disowning it or what? I imagine thousands of other
devs now have local forks of it on their home machine and can/will continue to
develop and release it?

------
badman_ting
I never used the thing, but people seemed pretty impressed by it. This post is
a mess though, it's all over the place.

~~~
grannyg00se
Yeah, I don't know what it is, what they've done, or why they are stopping.

Not in any real detail anyway.

------
mayanman
Mine does not work anymore, just spins. Mine also says Popcorn time Goodbye
was just released you should get it now!

------
514d3
Old working version:
[https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw...](https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWwvSb5g_eKgolRg)

Apparently they patched it after this release so they could shut it down;
tested the one above a moment ago and it still works

------
Oculus
I don't think this was Popcorn's choice. I'd be willing to bet their hand is
being forced here.

~~~
lucb1e
I think it was their choice, the way they go about it. They've given a huge
middle finger to the copyright industry while staying within legal bounds and
showing off their programming skills. Can't say they're set for life, but odds
are they made themselves a pretty solid future without being dragged along
with this project any further.

------
redox_
What does their last commit stand for? [https://github.com/popcorn-
time/popcorn-app/commit/7e4d851bc...](https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/commit/7e4d851bc02082d5bbc0260315fd61fe856d0bdc)

~~~
galapago
Last flush of code?

------
kayoone
Believing that piracy is solely a Service problem is pretty naive or downright
ignorant. Yes, some people pirate because other means of purchasing the
content in question are inferior but lets face it: People will always prefer
the free option

~~~
chii
Nobody is saying it's solely a service problem - but that the current level of
legit material isn't serving the full spectrum of available customers. Piracy
will always happen, so if you wanted less pirates, one way is to better serve
them.

------
denimboy
try this:

    
    
       https://github.com/hjhart/the_rotten_pirate

~~~
sheerun
You can also search torrent manually and use
[https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix](https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix)
with VLC

------
ghx
Kinda random, but I associate the word "popcorn" with time, because when I was
a kid growing up in the Bay Area, we always dialed POP-CORN (767-2676) to get
the current time. Probably just a coincidence?

------
Tycho
_We’ve shown that people will risk fines, lawsuits and whatever consequences
that may come just to be able to watch a recent movie in slippers. Just to get
the kind of experience they deserve._

What? Why do they deserve this?

------
NDizzle
That may be gone but you can still use
[http://www.nzbplayer.com/](http://www.nzbplayer.com/) if you absolutely must
watch things as you download them.

------
jacobbudin
> We became the underdog that would fight for the consumer.

That's like saying "Sure, we burned down the bank, but we did it for the
frustrated account holders."

------
elwell
Am interested in details, but none given.

------
staticelf
Why the fuck did they host the servers themselves? Was this planned all the
time?

------
manish_gill
I installed it 2 days ago. Was gonna try it out tonight, and now this. :(

~~~
checker659
Works regardless I think because it feeds off of torrents.

~~~
manish_gill
Don't think so. I just get a "please wait" spinner.

~~~
smileysteve
They changed / took down the api that got the torrent providers.

~~~
gmazzotti
The previous version still works, you can download it from here
[https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw...](https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWwvSb5g_eKgolRg)
(aprently in the last version they added something that let them shut it down
if the needed)

------
elwell
Well that was fast.

------
userbinator
Goodbye Popcorn Time, Hello Streisand Effect.

------
IAmNotBorat
I hope someone from Hollywood reads that.

~~~
wankershim
I hope not. It will convince them that bullying developers works because they
can't afford lawyers.

~~~
gscott
I made sure to download it right away a few days ago even though I don't know
when I will get around to trying it.

~~~
somesay
Too late. Their database is hosted somewhere online and now gone.

~~~
marrusl
Strange. Just worked fine for me.

~~~
mayanman
No, it does not anymore, just spins. Mine also says Popcorn time Goodbye was
just released you should get it now!

------
robinhoodexe
How long till someone forks it...

~~~
iLoch
It's already been forked multiple times via GitHub. I'm guessing whichever
fork currently had the most active developers will continue the application.
It's like the movie industry doesn't know how technology works or something...

------
jcslzr
i think the solution is going to be the spotify model for movies.

------
frade33
Just today I thought, can we an iPad version of this app. nevermind.

------
oh_sigh
I guess I'm the odd man out on reddit, er hackernews, but it doesn't seem too
brave or incredible to build an app which is used to primarily stream stolen
content.

~~~
yuvadam
Again with 'stolen'.

~~~
Nashhhh
Yeah stolen! I had a copy of Ghostbusters at home on my shelf and it
disappeared yesterday. I suspect a criminal using popcorntime must be
responsible.

~~~
oh_sigh
Yes, because words are only allowed to have a single meaning. Using the word
'steal' to refer to piracy to bypass payment to the rights holder has been
happening since at least the mid 80s(NYT reference from 1986:
[http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/28/nyregion/cable-tv-
operator...](http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/28/nyregion/cable-tv-operators-
unite-to-fight-theft-of-their-services.html) )

~~~
MAGZine
It's a pejorative term that predisposes someone to a certain conclusion.
Pretty easy to bust out the 'S' word and win the jury in .2 seconds. ;-)

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131130/15263725410/surpri...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131130/15263725410/surprise-
mpaa-told-it-cant-use-terms-piracy-theft-stealing-during-hotfile-trial.shtml)

~~~
Nashhhh
Exactly

