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Goodbye Popcorn Time

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Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#141

Post by chipotle_coyote »

secstate wrote: post #95
mentos wrote: post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users' faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your cable/satellite company (we'll come back to the "theoretically" in a moment): watch new shows the day after they aired, as many as you want. Plus a lot of back catalog stuff, plus weird independent stuff that they bring in. Not for cable or satellite prices of $100+ a month (and that's not counting "premium" channels like HBO), not even for the promotional special prices of ~$30 a month, but for $7.99 a month, and with about half as many ads, given that Hulu's breaks are 60-90 seconds instead of 2-4 minutes.

I don't know. On the surface, isn't that kind of an amazing improvement?

Coming back to the "theoretically," the problems I see with Hulu are certainly driven by stupid contractual obligations: they usually only have the last five episodes of any given series, so if you want to start watching something halfway through the season you're out of luck; they sometimes don't have rights to stream things on Hulu Plus that they do on normal Hulu, which is banana crazypants; and of course, there are shows and even whole networks they don't carry. But out of all the issues with Hulu, I'm not sure their failure to give us everything commercial free is actually that outrageous.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#142

Post by Crito »

mentos wrote: post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

You also need to factor in how much my time and effort is worth to me.

I'd much rather spend a few dollars and get a DRM free copy, than spend a few minutes on a shaddy ad/malware ridden torrent site to get a free DRM free copy.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#143

Post by Crito »

api wrote: post #108

I've scanned this whole thread and there's not a single post that is at all critical of the intentions behind Popcorn Time. I guess you're all okay with a world where content creators don't eat. Or do you have a better idea than copyright? If so, by all means let's hear it. I promise you that the person who solves that problem in an accessible way will be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least Tim Berners-Lee. Every s…

Cool it with your anti-"techie" ranting. I don't think I've ever met anybody that pirates as many movies as just about any film student. Literally terabytes of movies, before terabytes or multi-GB HD movies were cool. "Forever minus a day" copyright terms hurt artists too.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#144

Post by bavcyc »

mentos wrote: post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

The Laffer curve might apply to more than taxes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

To quote Captain Renault "I'm shocked..."

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#145

Post by Dystopian »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #102
mentos wrote: post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

> I think the industry should do what Hulu has done over the past 5 years. Give the product away virtually for free, collect an enormous user base while you starve/kill the demand for the equivalent torrents, slowly increase the price of the service until you find equilibrium, then profit. Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to p…

> Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to put many more ads into online content to receive the same revenue

I know there's a reason (traditional ad rates, etc.) - but I don't understand the disparity between online and television advertising rates.

If anything online advertising would seem to be significantly more powerful since you can build customized profiles about the viewers (vs. only having a Nielsen chips in every so many households) and broad TV show audiences.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#146

Post by Eleutheria »

User8712 wrote: post #66
programminggeek wrote: post #34

Did anyone believe that Popcorn Time was going to end any other way than this? Either they were going to be shut down by their own choice, or their hand would be forced by outside litigation. Just because something is legal doesn't mean companies won't spend millions of dollars to make your life miserable because of what you built.

Is it surprising that an appication used to stream torrents, is primarily used for piracy? No, no it's not, and this is why I'm scratching my head. They knew from day one, before they wrote a single line of code that the application would be used for pirating movies. For this reason, I assumed they had a plan, because surely no sane development team would put forth the time to setup this project, and then act surpris…

Weapons are used to kill people, still they're not illegal.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#147

Post by kilian »

rhino369 wrote: post #120
j_baker wrote: post #64

> Popcorn Time as a project is legal. We checked. The law isn't quite so black and white. There are a lot of different theories good lawyers can come up with. At the end of the day, the only thing that's legal is what a court says is legal.

And even if you had to make a legal / not legal binary choice, popcorn time wasn't legal. How do you check 4 times and not read MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.

Not everyone lives in the USA ;) I don't know, but it could very well be that there are precedents in their home country Argentina supporting the 'legal' conclusion.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#148

Post by vacri »

secstate wrote: post #95
mentos wrote: post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users' faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

I don't know about the timelines in the US, but I do know that here in Australia, cable TV initially had one major thing going for it: you didn't get ads during a show. You'd get ads between shows to round out the minutes, and usually not for commercial products, but not during the show.

It didn't take long for them to stop that practice, which perplexed me - what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then? You directly pay them and they still cram just as many ads into the timeslots?

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#149

Post by joyeuse6701 »

baby wrote: post #68
aet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting to see what percentage of use cases were for "legal purposes"

I doubt it would be more than zero.

Well, I watched 300 on it, and I owned a copy of 300 it just so happens to be HD-DVD...and at home.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#150

Post by vacri »

fjcaetano wrote: post #69

It doesn't matter. The code is already out there. Respectfully, I think the authors didn't think much and were kinda dumb. The project had a great potential, it was barely legal, they bought a fight with the media industry, but the cherry-on-top is that they putted their asses on the line. They shouldn't have used their real names. Anonymise your accounts and be happy. But as I said, it doesn't matter. Everyone alrea…

Unless you really know what you're doing, it's hard to be anonymous online against a resourced, interested opponent.
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