Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 272 posts

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

wmf wrote: post #28
natdempk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.

> I think most people watch TV on a TV

HBO Go is an online service for people with an HBO subscription through a Cable/Satellite provider that's billed as making HBO content available on other devices; while you might get some utility out of HBO GO on a TV (e.g., for streaming back catalog content that isn't available through HBO On Demand), its not really the primary use case.

OTOH, neither is using it through a browser; I think the mobile app (which does support HD) is the main vehicle. I'm somewhat surprised if the browser version doesn't, but not that surprised

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#62

Post by trengrj »

lvs wrote: post #27
trengrj wrote: post #15

It seems a little weird that the fork Wired is promoting in this post is the fork alleged to have malware http://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4pop... (also known as Time4Popcorn). I don't know why they didn't promote popcorntime.io instead which is the more popular and open fork ranking higher on Google etc.

It's not clear if any of that is true: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2n3dht/time4po...

There are many instances of people reporting boomcheap malware after installing Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se): https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2l3d4t/boomche...

Time4Popcorn probably had to rebrand to popcorn-time.se for these issues. It is not properly open source, while on popcorntime.io you can see the latest source at git.popcorntime.io, on popcorn-time.se you can only get tar balls.

Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se) does not even include the node-webkit viewer in their app. The executable itself is just a iframe to http://app.popcorn-time.se/.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#63

Post by natdempk »

wmf wrote: post #28
natdempk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.

The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. One of the best examples of truly not caring about UX is their default sorting of episodes. All shows sort episodes by most-recent air date, including shows that have fully aired, so if you want to get to the first episode of a show you have to scroll through a full season's worth of episodes. This is after having to scroll through all HBO shows alphabetically to find the one I want with no concept of recently watched. Again compare to Netflix where it takes a single button press to start watching a new series on every platform. There is a clear pattern that some companies just don't care about customer experience.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#64

Post by higherpurpose »

lvs wrote: post #33
natdempk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

I completely agree re: the quality of streaming service apps. The Amazon Prime Video player is a joke. HBO GO is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used on Android. Netflix has gone a long way to improving their service and is probably the most satisfactory of them. Generally speaking, though, the experience of using these apps and the predictability/accessibility of content is not going to outcompete free & easy.

The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work).

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#65

Post by task_queue »

lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

There will be less incentive when developers are raided and brought to court for their high crimes against the industry.

Why not have the FBI go after the pirates instead of changing the structure of their business?

It works well for them when it comes to unlicensed reproductions and hardware that facilitates piracy.

If Popcorn time could turn a dime while playing the game legally, and become a threat like Netflix was, I'd believe it.

It's easier to crack a few skulls legally when pirates start getting flagrant than it is to treat them like a legal competitor.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#66

Post by giancarlostoro »

natdempk wrote: post #22
lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

Reminds me of what Gabe Newell said about piracy: It's not a pricing issue, but a service issue.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#67

Post by lobster_johnson »

natdempk wrote: post #22
lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

It's also rather bizarre that you have to go to a provider's app to get their content. All the content is siloed and walled off by each provider, so you have to remember whether a show is on HBO or Netflix or whatever. The old TV model of "channels" doesn't work with streaming.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#68

Post by xnull6guest »

madez wrote: post #53
xnull6guest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#69

Post by return0 »

lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

You are asking for the impossible, people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0. Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free.

The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it worked for a while copies were physical, but now we re going back to the pre-copyright era where culture was spreading freely. We can blame piracy for that, but it's not just piracy. The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production. There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down. Even without piracy these industries would face big problems.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#70

Post by ponyous »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #8
sroerick wrote: post #3

Does anybody know what it would require to fork Popcorn Time to only support Creative Commons and public domain content? I've spent a lot of time boycotting copyrighted works and I'd like to have a nice user interface to do this.

I really like that idea. I don't know what the goal of Popcorn Time is (maybe they want change in the industry, maybe they just like free stuff) but if the goal is to make access to content even easier than it already is then running the project with only CC/public domain content would be a good way to go. Show that it works and start getting bigger creators signing on (kind of the way BitTorrent does legitimate stuf…

What about opt-in to non CC/public domain content? Does this solves anything?
Post reply on HN