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Comment by xnull6guest | Hacker News Reader

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xnull6guest

I did not read the article.

Is there a website to get popcorn time or the 'torrent' files for them?

This would be the place for ads.

Edit: I have now read the article in full. Question about financing below.

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Here's an idea: read the article. If you still have questions after you've done that, then maybe ask them.

I just did this.

It is not that ads are not possible, it is that ads are currently not shown.

So here's a question: do we expect that to continue in perpetuity? My expectation would be that of the root comment: the website will in the future support its traffic and hosting costs with ads and make huge margins. Is there some reason why this expectation is foolish?

It's an expectation without proof. We have no evidence suggesting they will do that, nor any suggesting they won't. So it's a pretty academic conversation. They could turn Popcorn Time into a Bitcoin mining outfit without telling anyone, too.

With the advent of S3 storage and the like I would imagine their hosting costs are very small, and almost all at download time, not run time.

All expectations have no proof? Yes it's speculation.

Re: evidence. The evidence we do have is from precedent - former file sharing services that have made money from similar types of technologies (notably bit-torrent). It is an established fact that money can be made via advertizing and given both that CPUs are terrible at mining cryptocurrencies and that it would dramatically degrade performance the bitcoin suggestion is unlikely.

Agreed that it is speculation. But this is what the OP asked for at the top: speculations as to why the developers would invest in the project.

RE: costs being relatively low. Agreed. Revenue from ads are similarly small. The calculus is performed at scale - which is exactly what this technology hopes to be. The relatively low costs are what makes large margins with advertizing possible.

Popcorn Time is at its heart just a torrent client using streamed torrent download to pipe the result into a media player.

You can just feed a torrent file or a magnet link into Popcorn Time and it will play.

There are lots of torrent clients and media players that are free software which you can use to get the same result.

Your expection is baseless because said facts.

Right, but if you look at the large torrent sites they make large amounts of money from ads. They are 'free' but they make money (they don't make money from you - they make money by you).

Since popcorn time is effectively the same thing, I would expect the same thing. That's my grounding.

Popcorn Time is _not_ the same thing, as I've described in my previous comment. You seem not to read very well.

I think you should consider the possibility that he is not participating in this discussion in good faith.

> Popcorn Time is at its heart just a torrent client using streamed torrent download to pipe the result into a media player.

> You can just feed a torrent file or a magnet link into Popcorn Time and it will play.

This is what I intended to mean by 'the same thing'. Can you expound on technical reasons why it is different in such a way that advertising is not possible or is not likely?

The described technology is independent of the source of the torrent. Their relation is similiar to the relationship between a program and an OS. Yes, the OS permits the usage of the program but the OS is not responsible in any way for the program nor does it imply that the OS wants to make money off the profits of the program.

The moment Popcorn Time adds Ads, there will be a fork without them.

> The described technology is independent of the source of the torrent.

This also applies to bittorrent.

> The moment Popcorn Time adds Ads, there will be a fork without them.

I understand what you mean. You're thinking I'm claiming the ads would go inside the client? If you look up the chain of conversation, I said that the ads would go on the website that hosts the magnets/torrents.

We see the same thing with bittorrent. Ad free clients. Ad bannered websites. We should expect the same with popcorn time websites.

You don't need to access any website to use Popcorn Time.

Is the idea that the program has a means to search, verify and download torrent files outside of centralized magnet/torrent websites? I did not get this from the article.

I think you should try Popcorn Time. You know, for research purposes. ;)

> Ad free clients. Ad bannered websites. We should expect the same with popcorn time websites.

This is what you're not understanding: There are no "Popcorn Time websites" (except for a source to download the client)

Popcorn Time is a combined torrent-client/media player/search engine. You don't have to go to any websites (with ads or otherwise), you can click on nice pretty movie-poster images or search from within the program itself. There aren't any ads in Popcorn Time, and you don't have to leave Popcorn Time to go find media. It is one unified, seamless user experience, equivalent to the Netflix app.

I see. I did not get that from the article (it looks like I misunderstood).

Thank you for clarifying further (without more downvote nukes).

It appears that adding ads, so long at there are many competing clients, would be difficult.

I was very wrong.

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