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Goodbye Popcorn Time

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Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#161
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it boils down to the psychology of "something to gain" vs. "something to lose". New creatives who are kickstarting and bootstrapping lean towards the former, and are fine with relinquishing control if it means they get sales at all. Old guard suits are banking on a statistically predictable return rate, and focus on reducing risks to that return, even at the cost of additional short-term profits or long-term…

Counterpoint: Louis CK releases his videos for $5 and says please don't pirate it. People do I'm sure, but there are enough people who see the value. I paid the $5 because I want Louis to keep doing his thing.

I think of Louis CK as being more on the indie "something to gain" side, even though he risked serious money out-of-pocket on his first special. He wasn't constrained by a history of previous business practices and any particular expecatations of the returns; whereas HBO has been churning out comedy specials for decades, and would never have risked their business model on a DRM-free experiment in a million years.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#162
post #125
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a pricing problem, but also a distribution and licensing problem. Netflix for example is not available in most countries of the world, and nor it nor anything like it has all the latest shows and movies on time , some being available many years later. The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web. The problem is it could take 20 years before…

> The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web. I agree, I wonder though if future Hollywood will be more or less profitable. Imagine a future where all movies/tv shows were given away for free/stolen, how would they profit? I think the answer is advertising inside the movie/show. I recently saw this done pretty tastefully in an episode of 'Worka…

> What I think is even more interesting is the fact that advertising, such a wildly inefficient method, right now props up so many industries.

What makes you think advertising is inefficient? For specific parties it's extremely efficient. It gives the advertiser the power to change the viewer's preference between Brand X and Brand Y. Allowing himself to be convinced to buy Brand X in exchange for content allows the viewer to pay for the content with money out of Brand Y's pocket instead of his own. In many cases this brings more profit to the content provider than that customer would be willing to pay directly out of pocket. The detriment goes almost entirely to the competing brand who loses a sale to the advertiser.

Which is really the trouble for advertisers. Advertising is an arms race. Brand X buys advertising and takes market share from Brand Y, so Brand Y buys advertising to take it back. Repeat until advertising expenses consume a significant portion of the margins for every brand, in all industries across the entire world economy. Kind of a nice business to be in, isn't it? Start an economic war and force all sides to bid against each other to buy your weapons.

> Imagine if Google released a product tomorrow that was 100% efficient at replacing advertising.. Some sort of beam that just got people to understand/like your product immediately. What would all of these major industries do for revenue?

Use the beam to make people like their products enough to pay money for them?

A viewer's time is worth more to the advertiser than to the viewer, and the content provider profits more from arranging that transaction than selling the content directly for money. Content providers could still sell content for money if advertising somehow disappeared, but they would be significantly less profitable because they would lose their ability to arbitrage the time-for-money transaction between the advertiser and the viewer.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#163

Anyone interested in the app can still build it from their repo. https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app

If I wasn't on Comcast I would try this out.. I've had to resort to a lower-tech approach: * Rent a cheap server * Run transmission daemon on it * SSH into server, port forward 9091 * Connect to localhost:9091 and add torrents that way * When downloads are done, scp them off to my local network Con: way too many steps involved Pro: encrypted to/from my local network I know this is not nearly the same as Popcorn Time,…

I have a similar setup, but I've automated a few more steps.

I have couchpotato[1] running on my VPS. When I add a movie to it, it'll find and drop the torrent file to a directory, where rtorrent will pick it up and immediately start downloading it. When it finishes, it moves the files to a temporary directory, where couchpotato will detect them, rename them and move them to yet another directory, where Git Annex Assistant[2] will add them to its store and sync to a Raspberry Pi in my home through SSH/rsync.

Then I can either copy the file to my laptop or Android by doing "git annex get " or stream it from the Samba server running on the Pi.

Complicated to setup initially, yes, but now it runs smoothly with almost no manual work.

[1] https://couchpota.to/

[2] https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think so. I just get a "please wait" spinner.

They changed / took down the api that got the torrent providers.

The previous version still works, you can download it from here https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw... (aprently in the last version they added something that let them shut it down if the needed)

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works regardless I think because it feeds off of torrents.

Not working for me any more. :(

The previous version still works, you can download it from here https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw.... (aprently in the last version they added something that let them shut it down if the needed)

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#166

Mine does not work anymore, just spins. Mine also says Popcorn time Goodbye was just released you should get it now!

The previous version still works, you can download it from here https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw.... (aprently in the last version they added something that let them shut it down if the needed)

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#167
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange. Just worked fine for me.

No, it does not anymore, just spins. Mine also says Popcorn time Goodbye was just released you should get it now!

The previous version still works, you can download it from here https://mega.co.nz/#!aoB02BwK!AXxujXpZ2AJPe9YUwYDs1EYM6BBnWw.... (aprently in the last version they added something that let them shut it down if the needed)

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#168

On the topic of pirated content, I was an early contributor to the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter, and I received my "digital download" today. It consisted of a link to sign up to two separate websites to download a specific player that would stream the video for me on supported platforms only . Also, the HD version might not be available right away. I checked and the torrent of the HD version had been online for 30…

It's worth noting that while Veronica Mars was kickstarted, Warner Brothers still owns it.

I strongly suspect they're the entity responsible for the distribution decisions.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#170
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you predicted, it looks like the new "official" repo is here: https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app and people have already begun work on getting it working again.

I was unaware of that repo yet, it took me 1 hour to get it working though some features was disabled : https://github.com/cettox/popcorn-app and for precompiled executables visit http://kemald.com/pt/popcorn.html

This seems to quit immediately for me in Mac :(
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