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?
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.
Since popcorn time is effectively the same thing, I would expect the same thing. That's my grounding.
> 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 moment Popcorn Time adds Ads, there will be a fork without them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.