Popcorn Time, the popular video hacking app, is officially dead, again. Developers behind the once immensely popular torrent platform Announced Tuesday he had been withdrawn due to a recession in the public interest. A visit to the project's website reveals what appears to be an illustration of a dead popcorn box, as well as a graph showing interest declining over time. Bloomberg News reports that the project developers also sent emails to the media confirming the site's disappearance.
This is not the first, nor is it likely to be the last, that Popcorn Time will be buried. The (mostly) illegal video torrent platform was originally thrown out by a development team in Buenos Aires in March 2014. The application, which had a similar design to Netflix and was created as an open source project, used BitTorrent technology to allow users to find and stream popular movies, and it worked with the most popular families of operating systems, including iOS, Linux and Windows.
The prospect of torrent-capable free movies in a user-friendly interface obviously made the project an instant hit with people all over the world. However, after just a week, and a massive surge in public interest and positive press reception, Popcorn Time was forced to close (potentially as a result of police action), although fans of the original immediately reworked its code in several forked iterations, and the project has since lived on through different development teams around the world. (This most recently retired version was originally released in early 2020, just in time for the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone had nothing better to do than sit back and have fun.
Downloading pirated copyrighted movie files is obviously illegal (transmission exists in some of a legally gray area but it is still mostly illegal) and thus the life of the app has always been strained. The illicit nature of Popcorn Time and the apparent threat that the pirated app has posed to the entertainment industry means that it has often been the subject of legal disputes. In 2015, the app inspired a strange demand involving 11 unfortunate people who had used it to download Adam Sandler's horrible movie about a shape-shifting shoemaker, The shoemaker. That same year, Popcorn Time also spawned a music industry equivalent, Aurous, which it subsequently earned defendant into oblivion by the Recording Industry Association of America. Several countries sometimes have forbidden the web domains associated with the application and, in some cases, people have been arrested Y faced criminal charges by simply telling people where to find it on the web.
However, at the end of the day, people still want to watch free movies and TV shows. A recent study found that Pirated video footage gets a whopping 230 billion views a year.. And, because of Popcorn Time's free and open source code, developers can always grab it and revive the platform, which, like John Barleycorn, will rise again in a still unknown incarnation. So maybe it's better to say RIP, Popcorn Time, until next time ...
