This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Hollywood has a new arch villain. Popcorn Time, a website launched in early 2014, puts a slick veneer on illegal content streaming, with a Netflix-like interface coupled with a vast library of pirated torrents.
The app was first developed by a small group of Argentinian developers, who halted work on the project in March 2014 after movie industry bodies and ISPs threatened legal action. But it became too popular to shut down. A community of independent coders quickly took up the reins, launching a number of Popcorn Time offshoots ranging from popcorntime.io to popcorn-time.se (the latter now claims millions of users and 100,000 downloads of the app per day). In January, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings singled it out as a major competitor to Netflix in a letter to shareholders. "We have designers, we have people working on Android, people working on the desktop version, people managing the forums," says Robert English, a Canada-based programmer and self-appointed spokesperson for PopcornTime.io. According to English, Popcorn Time won't go away until traditional streaming services abandon geolocked content and restrictions on VPNs. "If Netflix provided the same service we do -- the latest shows, the latest movies, not region-locked, Popcorn Time wouldn't have made it. All the content is already available online. We don't host or create any content."
There are other reasons Popcorn Time is so popular -- streaming is faster than downloading torrents, it's easy to use with a cleanly designed interface and claims to be virus-free. It's also usable wherever you live. "We're more popular where Netflix isn't available," notes English. He also claims that the site's biggest draw isn't that it's free, but the size of its library.
Until legal competitors can improve their offerings -- an impossible scenario, given the nightmarishly complex network of content rights and original shows -- Popcorn Time will continue to thrive. "It's possible that we'd stop developing Popcorn Time when there was something [legal] out there that had the same feature set," English admits. "But I can't say that right now because we're not there."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
