Popcorn Time in Your Browser
popcorninyourbrowser.net
popcorninyourbrowser.net
They're the Netflix of piracy and I think Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).
Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much harder.
And funding/creating it. Anyone can take something they don't own and give it away for free. Investing in its creation and ensuring that investment is successful is much more difficult and limits your options for distribution.
Netflix is a great product that falls down only in terms of content. If Netflix had more TV shows as box sets, and new episodes of currently being broadcast TV seasons, I would happily pay 10 times as much as I do (no exaggeration) and never use anything else legal or otherwise. The resistance that the established industry has to making deals to enable that sort of service is the reason that Popcorn Time can beat them.
...and app UI. Have you ever tried to drive your chromecast with the netflix app? It's buggy as hell, doesn't display comments, doesn't display related content, and has a horrible search experience. I half believe that it's bad deliberately as a way to cover up holes in their content.
I thought they were means? Means to accomplish progress in human society.
edit : that's not just a snarky comment. i always find it amusing whenever people advocate giving other's people's work away for free.
Your question itself, snarky or not, makes me sad. Doesn't that imply you spend a large part of your day doing something you don't like just for the sake of making money?
i'm asking for money because i think what i'm doing has value not because i didn't like doing it. And the fact that people like it so much they're ready to pay for it makes it even more enjoyable to me.
That sounded like a sad cooperation to me.
For you/someone: the other party is never interested in an constructive cooperation/dialogue. For the other party: you/someone sees the work itself as second (or less).
But as I now read you enjoy it by itself, I misunderstood.
What world do you live in where businesses exist to advance humanity and people work on things they like? I'd really like to move there. The world I live in, only a handful of companies believe in their feel-good mission statements and it's a luxury for someone's passions to overlap with an obtainable well paying job.
Just to be clear: I'm not expecting everyone to always be able to work on what they like. But as _a goal_, it sounds better to me than making as much money as possible.
You'd always take a better paying job over one which overlaps with your passions?
I'm not claiming it's legal or a valid business, only saying that the service will not be free soon. If they get paid afterwards, than it's probably something distributors should look at in the future.
Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.
I wonder how much Hollywood share its revenue with the content creators, not actors but more like writers, filmmakers, and all those that _create_.
are there numbers somewhere?
EDIT: s/studios/filmmakers -- thanks icebraining!
No one is obliged to give you money. Finding a business model that works is your problem, not your customers.
Forced lock-in is a model, but it's a violent one that makes people want to leave, and it's entirely predicated on there never being an escape hatch for your trapped customers.
There is now an escape hatch for content customers. They're no longer beholden to the choice of cinema or TV for their content, and haven't been for years. Whining about how much more money you made in the old days when people couldn't escape the cage really doesn't enamor you to people.
It's on hollywood to find a new business model that works in a post-cage world. If they can't, they'll go bankrupt and vanish, and I won't care. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of good content out there that's either low investment (think Primer) or can pay for itself in box office and/or merchandising alone (marvel, star wars, lord of the rings).
If your content creation is predicated on selling DVD's or subscriptions, and your DVD/subscription mechanism is so bad people are willingly buying VPN's to other countries to avoid using it (netflix in aus), that's not your customers problem in any fashion, it's yours.
This struck a chord with me and is exactly the reason why Hollywood and the Music Industry are flailing. They are trying to continue their business model that worked for so long into this new day and age. Adapt or die essentially.
*Maximum of 2 downloads. Approved devices only, Void where prohibited
I agree that the current system is broken, but saying you'll pirate until the studios work out it feels like an irresponsible point of view, to me.
Throughout history, there have been things that were hard to do: create a picture that looked like a landscape, create a complex piece of music from nothing, give somebody a ride 20 miles to the next town, correspond with somebody halfway around the world.
During this time, it was very common for people to come and pay just for the experience of the event, which was , in some cases, truly magical. Open-air powered carriages? Who wouldn't pay a lot of money to see and ride in one for a few minutes? A room with a few painted landscapes from far-off shores? It's a cultural event.
People and companies paid lots of money to increase the spectacle and social attractiveness of these experiences. Not only could you hear a collection of a dozen stringed instruments play, you could do so in the presence of a duke!
This is exactly where Hollywood is today. They're doing their damnedest to prevent the inevitable slide into commoditization that has occurred with every other art form and experience. The market eliminates inefficiencies. Today I can see pictures of just about anywhere in the world for nothing. I can listen to hundreds of instruments play -- any one of tens of thousands of songs -- for free. I can travel in luxury in a modern vehicle owned by my neighbor, while doing all of these other things, to the nearest town for pennies.
So the question isn't "how do you make these multi-million dollar cultural phenomenons". That's like asking "Who will be the next Beethoven?" Beethoven's dead, and the symphony, while it lives on as a cultural phenomenon, is no longer the primary means of consuming music.
So there's your answer: movies will no longer be the primary means of consuming long-form audio-visual entertainment. They will continue to exist for a long period of time just as the symphony does, and the experience of being with the actors and director for a first showing in a glitzy theater will probably never go away, but the bits and bytes of the thing will have virtually no value at all. Things change. That's just life. Always been like this.
Media companies are stuck in the dark ages where instead of trying to increase value of their product/service, they instead double down on increasing revenue per viewer with horrible anti-customer policies like 10-minute unskippable ads on a DVD you bought.
When you're investing hundreds of millions in your movies, and tens in your tv shows, the bar is set very high.
Now, when the distribution of that content required factories and fleets of trucks, it funneled all the money in the world into a small number of operators, because the cost of entry was so high, so very few people could operate in that space. That allowed very high investments, because the worlds disposable income was being split between a small number of people.
Today, the cost of production and distribution has dropped like a stone, and there are more players as a result. However, these companies are still investing like it's the 1970's.
Lets be clear here: Total number of films released in 1970: 1967 http://www.imdb.com/search/title/?release_date=1970&title_ty...
Total number of films released in 2014: 7320 http://www.imdb.com/search/title/?release_date=2014&title_ty...
It's not a monopoly any more. Small studios can beat big ones. It's not about finding a different way to charge the customer, it's about restructuring your investment strategy.
The key point is everything (or close to it) in one service.
Second, structure new programs to include more merch. Disney probably makes more on stuff from frozen than they did on frozen itself. Lossleaders aren't unheard of.
But above all, be bold, be decisive. Don't just run around and act like a bunch of babies.
Anything else assumes that because content exists, people have the right to consume it -- for free if they can work out how.
Let's be clear: I fully agree that Hollywood needs to catch up, and make content accessible in the way that Popcorn time has. But I don't have the right to consume content illegally, just because I find their business model inconvenient.
Umm, no. I don't owe buskers one penny, even if I enjoy their street performance.
> No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. Then, it's my call, whatever business model I pick.
Buskers are giving their content away for free. You don't have the right to attend their concert, just because you don't like the website they're selling their tickets on.
Would it be a good thing for society to allow you to pick a business model where you blare your music from loud speakers and then pay large burley men 50 cents to collect 1 dollar from anyone within earshot, on the premise that they heard your music so thus owe you?
They would if they could.
Historically no, they're not. Paying for a concert before you saw it was unheard of 150 years ago, and your ancestors would have considered you a mug for giving over your money before you knew if it was going to be a good show.
The norm for human history is that you see the show first and then decide afterwards how much it was worth, hence artists passing their hat around the audience. Bad shows got no money, which is how it works for literally everyone else today. We get paid at the end of the month, not the start, and bad enough fuckups get you fired.
Patticularly in the US, internet access is a cage. There's often only one provider, and their terms and conditons declare service not guarenteed. What choice do you have?
Then google fibre and municipal wifi start showing up, and look how hard comcast et al are screaming.
Maybe your rent, cable and phone need escape hatches as badly as your movie collection?
So I don't know. I can see phone as being a purchase of a block of X to use. The same with rent. Almost all internet comes with an uptime guarantee - say it's 99.9%, if it's down for more than 45 minutes, even Comcast will provide a credit.
I suppose it comes down to how you agree to consume it. I don't mind the 24 hour model on video rentals, when I can start that 24 hours any time within 30 days. I'm purchasing the right to watch the movie as many times as I want in a 24 hour window sometime in the next month. That said, I also believe that if I purchase unlimited video in the form of a DVD or download, I have the right to device-shift it wherever the heck I want.
This is a hairy issue.
If I pay for a concert, and I leave 10% of the way in because it's awful, will I get 90% of my money back?
No.
I'm happy to pay, as long as the terms are reasonable. (I have a Rdio account that's been active for years now - I can't remember the last time I pirated music... I can't remember the last time I pirated software, either).
However, in Canada, the only way to watch (for example) Game of Thrones is to
a) get a massive cable subscription which includes 1000 channels you don't want and HBO (which itself has 100 programs you don't want to watch and GoT),
b) wait for the episode to show up on itunes and pay $4.50 per episode (whaat?) (and oh, season 5 isn't available yet),
c) pirate.
Is it a huge surprise that a lot of people choose option C? And can you blame them? At a certain point, non-Americans specifically just get fed up with being told "sorry, no, that content isn't available in your region."
But, Piracy isn't a form of protest, any more than stealing a car is -- regardless of how reasonable you consider the price.
If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for every single person in the world except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).
Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly different because I contribute to a metric that content producers do pay attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.
They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll fix it for everyone.
(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).
Btw, you're being unfairly downvoted. Sorry.
It's the biggest logical fallacy to compare stealing digital content to stealing a car. It's a shame the word "steal" is used in both cases. The original owner of a stolen car no longer has his car after it's stolen. That is not true of digital piracy.
Can we instead compare it to illegally duplicating your car?
I'm pirating content. I'm watching something that I want to watch, and at the same time, I'm hoping that my small increment of the 'pirated_copies_of_got' metric causes someone at HBO to go and sort out the way they distribute content outside of the US.
Literally no one else is harmed - because, no, I'm not going to pay the prices they've set. It's just nowhere near worth it. I'll go read a book instead.
Btw, hacking someone else's account is considerably more 'wrong', in my opinion: you're breaching someone's personal info and preventing them from using their account.
I wish people would just stop with their dumb moral workarounds. The show costs $X. You don't want to pay. You know how to get the content via other means. And so you do.
Don't embarrass yourself further by claiming you're somehow helping HBO out by going against their wishes and pirating the show they produced. You don't know what effect you (and other pirates) are having on HBO's business.
You apparently work for a company that aims to empower musicians. I would expect you to have a deeper understanding of how difficult it can be to make a living producing entertainment in this day and age.
But look: all of these American companies look at Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and go "you know what, we're just going to focus on the US." <Sorry, that content is not available in your region>.
That's so amazingly frustrating. So, yes, I honestly do hope that HBO sees the international piracy numbers and sorts out its sketchy content deals with Bell Media and launches HBO Go in Canada. Until the TV/Movie industry gets its act together, I'll pirate. (Since music is available to stream in Canada, I don't pirate music. Simple as that.)
As for my job: a) my personal opinion has nothing to do with my company, but b) I'm pretty comfortable with how Wavo empowers musicians and artists. We're a small company, so the fully-realized vision is still a ways off, but fundamentally the goal of Wavo is to help artists. There are no contradictions here.
When the paid version is at least as good, people pay for it. cf Netflix.
No, it's not. I buy books (audible.com is amazing), I buy music, I buy software - all of which are just as easy to pirate.
I go to shows, I buy prints of photographsy that I like, I support artists. I am fully aware of how hard it is as an artist (my wife is an illustrator).
So, please don't reduce me down to "cheap bastard just doesn't want to pay". It's insulting and untrue.
You touched a nerve. The "I'm not doing any harm" line is the general defense to the piracy question and I think it's very much wrong. I think I'm right in saying that too many people attempt to use it as a moral cover for the fact that they just want stuff for free.
And there's definitely a part of me that is biased to "free is better than not-free," so for sure, that's a part of my decision-making process. But unless the content companies actively work to make it difficult for me to consume their content, I try very hard to inhibit that "i can get it for free" mentality.. Precisely because I do know how hard it can be for artists.
Anyway, thanks for the apology (and sorry for getting a bit defensive there). Cheers.
Joe Consumer can find various ways of maximizing his dollars. $15 of that goes to Spotify so that he and his wife can listen to whatever music they please whenever, wherever they want (except Taylor Swift because she has a mansion in Rhode Island to pay for).
Joe Consumer would rather not pay $70 to buy Frozen on three devices, one on Blu-Ray to watch on his television, the Apple Store to watch it on an iPad on the way to Disneyland and Google Play on the Nexus Tablet after taking the kids to the theatre to watch said movie for $50 all the while hosting a Frozen themed birthday party... He would rather tell the studios to go fuck themselves and download it.
so yea, I don't want to pay for it because I feel a bit cheated that I must pay three times for the same thing.and apparently I'm an asshole because Disney isn't getting every god damn cent of entertainment dollar they are entitled to according to piracy police like you. The Rent is too damn high.
As for the musicians not getting paid, please... anybody can pick up a guitar and become a musician and post it on the internet. That does not entitle anyone to be paid for it. Nobody is shedding tears for Taylor Swift's inability to make money.
Honor your argument, then, and go read a book.
That said, content distribution is completely broken outside the US, so I'm going to shed exactly one tiny crocodile tear for HBO when I do decide to get back into game of thrones. And I sure as hell won't be paying for it, unless they give me some sane options.
The terms aren't the only things that have to be reasonable, the quality of service must be as well.
As for HBO. It's too expensive for me. In the US it may be cheap, but it isn't in other countries. And the web-based version is unavailable "in my region".
I wouldn't mind paying for decent terms, but putting a huge amount of money to watch a single series at a time they dictate, is unacceptable. HBO broadcasts at a certain time, and I have to stick to their schedule. Awful. I've a life. Stuff happens.
Piracy is the only affordable way, and comes with a huge amount of extra bonuses (replay, pause, watch later, no installation cost).
Music pirates in particular tend to buy more music than non-pirates. I would wager this holds true in any media-field of pirating (but perhaps not software pirating). [0] There is a reason for this!
Pirates are enthusiasts. They love the content they consume and are likely to pay/buy things they really enjoy/enjoyed. Due to not having an unlimited income they pirate some things. For music pirates - there is a good chance that the music they are purchasing is from the same music label as the music they are pirating.
Pirates are also likely to tell their friends about a show they enjoyed. Pirates are also likely to buy merchandise from shows they enjoy.
For example - an extremely large portion of the American market for Japanese Anime-related goods is because of pirated fan-subbed anime. Shows that would have never been released or heard of in America and thus led to 0% revenue from America are pirated and their merchandise purchased. The number of figurines from おれいも for example. Or the number of だきまくら purchased from American-fans.
This simply can't be denied for the anime market in particular - and many fansubbers eventually get hired by the studios. Some studios try to shut down the fansubbers but most allow it to happen because fansub groups largely do not sub anime slated for an English release. It's an unspoken code of sorts of "Support the official release" - and since many anime fans don't necessarily speak Japanese, if someone isn't translating it for them they can't/won't watch it.
Pirating is beneficial for the anime scene. It's likely more beneficial than harmful for music for similar reasons. I'll concede that for Movies/TV Shows it gets a little iffy (do enough people buy merchandise who wouldn't if they hadn't pirated the show to see it?)
Then we can also look at video games. Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Minecraft. Games that were heavily pirated and the creators even went so far as to say "If you can't afford to play our game. Pirate it." Why? Free marketing and free publicity means more sales. It made economic sense to let your game go viral that way. What might be $20 in a lost sale to a pirate might win you $80 in 4 new sales from his friends (even if another 6 of his friends just pirated the game)
If you don't let him pirate the game you just lost $80 in sales and free marketing/publiclity from 7 people which likely lost you even more in sales.
Which brings me to the important part: Pirating doesn't mean a lost sale. It means free marketing and free publicity from someone who wouldn't have been a customer. If you can convert a "non-sale" to a "promotional consumer", why wouldn't you?
The economic spin usually given to pirates is it is "costing sales" which is, frankly, bullshit. They make more money off suing mass pirates than any "lost sales", so it's beneficial for them to keep pirating illegal.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/music-pirates-study...
Loss-of-sales is a bit harder to quantify, but it's touched upon by a comparison basis by this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat...
I don't extend my claim to music or any other form of infringement.
[0] http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54749/has-piracy-...
Had the pirated copies been sold - the same server issues would have happened. Though they would have had more resources to handle the situation and it would turn out better for everyone (especially the iOS devs who had to go offline for 4 months to deal with the situation).
However, "offline" games (ie. solo campaigns) or distributed servers (ie. minecraft) that do not connect to a centralized server won't take away company resources. The idea behind piracy is that nothing is being stolen or taken, only duplicated. Taking away server resources has a negative impact and although it is also considered "piracy" I would consider it closer to "theft" (the same as stealing a physical server might be!)
Without arguing over semantics of the meanings behind the word 'piracy' - will you agree with me that the shared issue of all of your examples was unpaid server space being 'stolen' by pirates? We may disagree on whether lost sales matter or don't matter in this scenario, but I hope we can both agree that the stolen server space was definitely an issue.
The Gamasutra article where money was spent on making piracy harder doesn't give any metrics for a meaningful conclusion to be drawn.
Did Spyro 2 being cracked in a week actually harm sales at all? Difficult to quantify. How about the profit from the next Spyro? Was it more or less profitable? If it was less profitable - was that a result of spending money on piracy protection? If it was more profitable - was that a result of adding piracy protection or because the Spyro series had surged in popularity after the success of Spyro 2?
The answer is difficult to quantify, especially without relevant metrics given. What was the cost of adding the piracy protection? Can you quantify "popularity growth" between the two games? Can they estimate how many people would have bought the game if they could not pirate it?
Some game devs spend a lot of time and money trying to prevent people from modding their games. Some game devs make it easier to mod their games or even encourage it.
If a mod gets popular and gets a community growing around the game - is it doing good or is it doing harm? Assuming that a large amount of the community growth is from people pirating the game to play the modded version (and assuming none of the above server issues)
There are 2 sides with difficult-to-measure metrics.
1) Is the mod and the pirates playing it bringing enough attention to the game and free publicity/advertisement as to onboard new paying customers?
2) Is the time and money spent on preventing such a mod community from growing going to cost more than potential "lost sales" of pirated copies of the game? In addition, what is a "lost sale" and how are they measured?
To expand upon the issue of "lost sales" a bit:
Plenty of pirates argue that if they could not pirate a game - they would not purchase it either. I fall into this crowd. Outside of the stupid amount of money I've spent on League of Legends, I've only spent money on games I originally pirated. I purchased the game, purchased DLC, or purchased merchandise related to the game. If I could not pirate the game - I would not bother playing it, telling my friends to buy it, or buying merchandise from it (since I wouldn't know I liked it!)
By allowing people like me to pirate you actually win an otherwise lost sale. This is what makes these metrics so hard to quantify. Too many game studios consider all piracy to be a lost sale when people like me are the exact opposite. Without piracy we would have been a lost sale.
So it comes down to "which game studio/game dev do you want to take their word for?" Many of them attribute their success to piracy of their games. Some of them say piracy killed their game.
Without quantifiable metrics... how do we know the "killed games" didn't die simply because they were bad games that, piracy aside, nobody wanted to purchase?
From a business perspective, that's the far more likely scenario than the good games that the game devs claimed piracy helped selling well regardless of piracy because ???
TL;DR
My argument is that piracy doesn't kill bad games due to lost sales. They don't get any sales because their game is bad and few people are willing to pay for it. On the contrary, popular pirated games still do amazingly well because they are good games that people are willing to pay for even with the availability of pirating. To myself, makes more sense from an economic perspective for gaming media.
The law may say they are, but the law is clearly impotent and I personally don't remember having signed the Mickey Mouse act, so no I don't think anybody owes Hollywood anything, especially because Hollywood was built on piracy.
I just read that sentence...am I now obliged?
Yes they are, if you create something that they derive value from. Whether it is to be given away for free or paid for is your prerogative as the value creator, not theirs.
On the other hand, if I coin a really good new word, everyone uses it without paying me, despite the value I have provided.
Content distributors are at liberty to uniquely watermark all content and hunt down every last pirate with massive penalties AND/OR threaten to stop producing content, if they so choose. Content viewers can also make choices, one of which could be to organize collective negotiation.
I am in no way in favor of our current system, and I agree Hollywood needs to find a new model or die, but Popcorn Time is not that business model, which is what I believe GP is saying.
No one is obliged to give you free content in the form of movies, music, books, video games, television shows, etc. Just because you can pirate or steal something doesn't mean it's morally or legally justifiable.
This discussion is basically about how content industries, with all their clout, are somehow unable to match the usability of some dudes with a bit of spare time.
Yeah, it's probably easier to make content accessible when you're willing to completely break the law and ignore the rights of the people who have invested in creating the content in the first place.
This is what common core is doing to our children, people.
And, you know, create it. Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do, especially if it's somebody else's stuff :-)
Even netflix, the poster child of film streaming, struggles with this same problem.
edit : or maybe that's what you meant too, in which case i'm sorry for the comment.
Of course, the problem is that we could actually lose the ability to assign sentimental value to any one of them. Immagine 10 identical Mona Lisas, only one of them real with the knowledge which since lost. The collection would be worth a lot, but what would be the price of 1 of them?
Actually, value is subjective. For example, if I didn't know I could sell a Van Gogh for a lot of money, it would be just as worthless to me as anything else I don't want.
In other words, a Van Gogh, just like everything else, has no "intrinsic value" that everyone would recognize.
Now if I could buy a Van Gogh for $5000 and sell it for $10000, I'd be happy to buy one. But if I could only sell it for $5500 it wouldn't be worth the trouble for me.
That's subjective value at work again. In the latter case, I'd value the time needed to buy and sell the painting higher than the $500 I could get from the exchange.
But there are things that are bought, sold, and traded for reasons other than reselling them to someone else for more money. You seem to have a vision of all human economic activity as a pyramid scheme.
Imagine if you want a pay to have a band playing in your bar. If they went in there, broke every table, played music so loud that customers got injured, and then assaulted a few others, would you still feel obligated to pay for their performance? Would you still pay others upfront? A game developer can put malware on your computer, break your hardware, not have a work product, and you are still expected to pay up front for the next game.
Video (as in popcorn time) can do less damage, but then we had the sony root kit and the payment system is also upfront with not guarantee of quality or enjoyment.
One suggested model is a payment system which is "thank you, keep going on please" if you were happy with the service, and a "disputing the credit card charge" if you are not. This has however the problem of being illegal, so it just easier to jump directly to piracy and do donation purchases when/if you like something.
The only thing that stand between Hollywood and a Popcorn like service they could monetize is a decision to treat it as a digital asset and take advantage of it as a digital asset.
The idea of intellectual property is no more artificial than real estate property or personal property. In my opinion it is even more defensible than real estate. The IP was created out of nothing by the creator. Land? The universe created it and someone just took it by force.
Any moron could make a cup, but cups don't have zero scarcity. And its easier to make a copy than a whole story for a movie.
I have played music many many years, and I can tell you from experience that its not something thats created out of nothing. Thats just not how this works.
So if you want to have a real fundamental discussion about this you need to understand how these things are made and what it means to create them.
In 2005 or even 2010 I would absolutely have agreed with you. However in 2015 all those really great independent brick and mortar video rental places I used to go to anywhere near me are long since bankrupt and closed down.
>Managers say Family Video buys and develops buildings and land, expanding the business beyond just video rentals.
http://www.waow.com/story/25971729/2014/07/08/unique-busines...
Popcorn Time seems like what many people want from Netflix: a much larger library. Something more like Spotify, but for movies and television.
edit: after checking 10 movies in the top current movies, finally found one with extras (released by Fox). so it exists, but nowhere near "most"
This "on-demand" nature of iTunes is enough of a value-add to justify the increased price, at least in my eyes.
In general iTunes manages to be bad in almost all ways software can be bad. In my mind, it's one of the worst applications I've had to deal with in recent years.
Imagine a world where content providers made content available for purchase over an open protocol, and allowed anyone to build apps to buy content on top of it. With real competition on the app side of things, non-piracy apps would be more usable than Popcorn Time, and things like iTunes would die in a heart beat.
I got pissed off and just pirated it and used Beamer.app to send the video to the AppleTV, it played back flawlessly.
I'm happy to pay for a movie. I've funded several documentary projects on Kickstarter. Just give me an MP4 or MKV file so I can trust that I can play it today and 10 years from now on any device I own.
DRM doesn't work. It only punishes the actual customers.
When Popcorn Time produces it's own content and distributes it in a consumer friendly way, then I think Hollywood has something to learn. Until then, this is just theft.
Quit with the shitty release schedules, regional locking/delays, etc etc.
There's a lot to learn about what people want to use, now they have to work out how to do something that's as easy but monetised/legal. Netflix did it, and people are willing to pay. Not, perhaps, as much as they'd like though. That's where the real rub is. I won't pay £4 to rent a movie from iTunes. I won't pay £12 for a DvD (full of extras I don't want, unskippable shit and general inconvenince).
Of course, they can always just choose to carry on as before, and assume they can scare people out of doing the easy thing instead of the "right" thing. The larger the gap between the two though - the less likely that is.
Yes, the movie industry needs to change. But one cannot compare the hurtles they have to jump (and figure out how to eliminate) with a site that does nothing but put a pretty image on content theft.
There's whole catalogs of movies I bet the movie industry would love to make available but can't simply because they can't get streaming licenses from some now defunct band that did the musical score for it (for example). You cannot just gloss over these kinds of challenges by saying, "Well, some thief who knows PHP can do it!".
It isn't just Hollywood, even HBO Go/HBO Now is so fenced in I can't just pay them to get streaming access but have to go through Apple which won't allow me to sort it out unless I actually have an iDevice
None of these companies make it easy besides Netflix. And for what? It doesn't even help them substantially [even tho they clearly think it does] it just drives me to wonder why I ever talked myself out of pirating things on moral grounds.
This happened to the music industry with Napster, but they learned a little too late. Now Spotify is the dominant force in the music streaming business.
That sounds like a solid idea all around. I though this was the javascript torrent client implementation, instead, it relies on yet another service that can be taken down.
WebRTC not websockets.
*: random country in the EU
It is unclear how anyone in the UK can benefit from TV programmes removed from this service, or WHY any content for which the BBC doesn't have permanent distribution rights (via iPlayer) should ever be funded or produced by the BBC.
It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.
When you look at how easy this content is to access now compared with 10 or 15 years ago when you had to have a video store membership, hope no one else had rented the copy, pay crazy prices, and remember to bring it back when you were done, I find it hard to believe people's biggest problem (and main reason for pirating) is ease of access. It's price plain a simple. People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. I've done it in the past and it was almost never about ease of access. It was about money.
But a lot of them will. They will pay for ease of access, legal access, and a good user experience.
If the industry had focused its energy on those willing to pay instead of those not willing to pay, maybe the UX Popcorn Time provides today would have been available as a legal subscription based service.
Just look at Spotify. Yes, a lot of people still don't pay for the music they consume, but a lot of people do. Pirating of music has certainly seen a decline, even if we may never get rid of it completely.
That goes for videos, games, and music.
What the fuck.
They lost over €150m last year and their losses have been growing. Content creators seem to dislike them and want an alternative. Just because you can do something and some people will pay doesn't mean it makes business sense.
I think what's needed is something like Steam or GOG, but for Movies. Preferably with un-DRM downloads because fuck if I'm watching movies in Flash. (Same goes for Silverlight - mplayer or fuck you. Torrents let me watch with mplayer. On finicky graphics drivers who occasionally fail at vsync, choice of player matters.)
Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download - but I can go to a site, not give anyone money, and get that download anyways? Movie industry, why do you not want my money? Hell, set up an "indemnity service"! Select a movie, pay them, and they promise to not sue you. Zero distribution infrastructure required.
Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one?
There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands (MKV files, availability while in theatres, all I can watch for $5 per month, the technology used to stream the content must be one I like) in order to justify their piracy.
Relying on Flash or Silverlight is similar. I use Linux, and Flash is officially unsupported on Linux. Silverlight has never been officially supported on Linux. If these are the options, then I cannot watch the movie out of the box, I have to find a flash installer (I had better hope one's in my package repositories), or I have to install wine and build Silverlight into my browser or some such.
I think it is totally reasonable that you would ask the studios to provide content in a manner that you can actually watch. Let's not even get in to the Blu-Ray encryption snafu and how that affected those of us who use non-commercial operating systems.
The current situation is that I have to watch TV shows via EME within Chrome or Flash or Silverlight (non of which I would otherwise have near my computer) or not be able to pay the content producers any money (which I like doing because I want new content created). It is as if I had to own a sony TV to tune into certain channels and a panasonic TV to watch others.
If they want to prevent piracy then simply watermark the MKV files individually, register the sales and sue the buyers who's MKVs end up being torrented.
So if I hand built my own codec I could then ask Netflix to provide videos to me using it?
Of course, that's an extreme example. But they're not obliged to cater to your every whim - they're a business that makes business decisions, like losing X% of customers because they don't want to support Y codec/platform/whatever.
So it's more like a betamax owner complaining that movies are only issued on VHS :)
All of your options fail either for (a) not working in my country and (b) are physical and non-digital.
"Digital content I can watch right away" is not a instanely specific demand.
As for (b) I don't think that's an insanely specific demand and don't believe I said it was. In fact I listed a few of the demands in my comment. However it's also not a good justification for piracy imo. The content is still available to you with (for most people) very little effort.
Steam games have Steam DRM, it's just not as annoying as other DRM options. Agreed, GOG is great however (0 DRM).
For some it's about money yes, but for lots of people it's about the user experience or simply about availability in the first place.
PC game piracy proves this. Games on steam get pirated in large numbers even when the pirate copy is harder to download, install and use. And often it has reduced functionality.
It's quite simple: give me spotify premium or give me itunes, but for video content. I want to have everything ever made, as soon as it is made (none of that "it's in the theatre so you have to wait" B.S.), either for a fixed reasonable monthly rental fee, or for a fixed reasonable purchasing price. I want that content on every device I have, on-demand, in the best possible quality. I'm ok with DRM for rental as long as it does not prevent access on the devices I own (ipad, windows tablet, laptop, apple tv, etc...). I'm not ok with DRM for purchasing, because when I buy something I want to own it forever. Give me that and I'll gladly pay for it, but the movie and TV industry simply doesn't want my money it seems. I pay for netflix, because that's basically the best I can get, but it's not even close to what I want.
The music industry eventually figured this stuff out and I don't pirate any music at all anymore. I still hold out hope that eventually the movie and TV industry will stop refusing to take my money.
You can't get a good copy of a movie until DVDs and brs are released. Cams and TSs are terrible.
If something like popcorn time went mainstream they would just stop releasing disc media and downloads until well after the theatre stopped playing.
TV is the industry that should be worried. If popcorn time goes mainstream we'll never see high budget cable content ever again. Just 100% low budget sitcoms, soap operas and reality TV. But not with constant in show advertising that scenesters can't edit out.
I'm going to ignore the piracy aspect of this site (since I don't support copyright infringement) and just talk about the implementation. This site is connecting to a centralized service to fetch the torrent data. It's not P2P, it's easy to censor, and it likely won't be around for long.
What we really need is a true P2P implementation of BitTorrent in the browser. I'm working on just such a project: WebTorrent (http://webtorrent.io).
You can see a demo here: https://instant.io
Here is a link to watch Sintel (Creative Commons 3.0): https://instant.io/#c6642b73cf82dc52b5d538fabfdf9c8e3d9e850f
WebTorrent is powered by WebRTC, the de-facto standard for connecting two peers in the web browser. It even works in desktop apps (via Electron or NW.js) and mobile apps (via embedding the webrtc.org library).
With WebRTC, we can connect all types of endpoints (desktop, web, mobile) directly and completely P2P. This is the underlying transport that all future P2P protocols should be built upon.
Right now, the primary limitation of WebTorrent in the browser is that you can't just paste in any random magnet uri or .torrent file and have it work. The torrent must be seeded by a WebRTC-capable client, i.e. webtorrent-hybrid (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid) or https://instant.io.
We plan to build a desktop client (soon!) that can connect to normal BitTorrent peers, as well as WebRTC peers. These long-running peers will ensure there's lots of content available in the network that the shorter-running web peers can access.
This is the vision: All torrent clients (desktop, web, mobile) talking directly to each other. If you're interested in learning more about the idea of "WebRTC everywhere", here are some links:
This problem is not likely to go away very easily, I suppose.
I can't wait for the final version!
After they start charging actual money (...well, Bitcoin), this will stop working.
I genuinely wonder, though, if these services are published just to annoy the copyright owners or for some benefit to the author that I sadly cannot see.
edit: They also do not seem to serve ads. Maybe an experiment for a potential legal version? Who knows...
[1]: currently out of service, used to be available at http://joker.org/ , discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520954
the question is if they will be able to handle the economy of scale of the whole world trying to move forward --I hope not.
So with this, i really question the "privacy" and legality of this service and coinado.io.
They may have to respond to takedown requests or similar though, but seeing as how they only know the hash it will be a lot easier for them to claim ignorance
I'm not sure what your privacy concerns are... You can track clients downloading torrents pretty easily, if anything this would help as it adds another layer of indirection
The issue is that that has nothing to do with torrents - it's a direct link to the FILE of the movie, plain and simple.
coinado seems like it should be ok though
Other than that - great implementation. I didn't know this was even possible! Good job.
Seriously, I don't get it. All I can see is that I can choose from some movies and stream them.
But that's neither innovative nor new ...
Content should default to free and accessible, with few exceptions. Content creators should be able to earn a living.
Those two statements are not mutually exclusive, but the current status quo makes them so.
That would also create content creators. That is, allow people who would not normally create content from lack of time or security to begin doing so.
It would also eliminate the waste caused from having a big department to determine who exactly "content creators" are.