Live data from Hacker News

Popcorn Time in Your Browser

popcorninyourbrowser.net

31–40 of 262 posts

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#31

Popcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue from this and build something that people actually want to use.

It's much easier to streamline something when you don't have to follow any of the rules. The movie industry has to think of distribution agreements, localising content and maximising profit - just like any other business. When you have nothing to lose you can do what you want. I guess they've gotten close to this with Netflix. There are still geo-restrictions there and not all content is available but for most people…

While those problems are real, they are also self inflicted by the movie industry. I don't agree it's about money. Recently Netflix became available in my country (the netherlands) and many people I know stopped pirating content. It simply was not available legally before Netflix. You had to wait two years to watch a TV series and then you had to watch it at a time when some TV station decided to broadcast it. It was the same for games. When steam came lots of people stopped pirating games. Same for music.

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.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#32
> Coinado is a remote torrenting service. We do the torrenting for you, worry about seeding, keep your privacy and deliver the file over an encrypted connection. Requesting a file is simple. You just append the info hash of the torrent to the Coinado domain and when you start the download, the torrenting happens transparently on our servers and a minute later the file starts streaming to you.

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.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much easier to streamline something when you don't have to follow any of the rules. The movie industry has to think of distribution agreements, localising content and maximising profit - just like any other business. When you have nothing to lose you can do what you want. I guess they've gotten close to this with Netflix. There are still geo-restrictions there and not all content is available but for most people…

> People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. 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 do…

Due to DRM, I usually have a better user experience with the pirated version.

That goes for videos, games, and music.

What the fuck.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#34
post #20

Every few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for the owner. 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 i…

I guess the main problem is that browsers are not allowed to connect to random IP addresses using anything other than standard protocols. Otherwise, every website could potentially turn itself into a botnet.

This problem is not likely to go away very easily, I suppose.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#35

Popcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue from this and build something that people actually want to use.

I never used either, so I'm genuinely curious: what does Netflix lack, from that list?

Nothing, but it does gain another thing - text saying "I'm sorry, not available where you live." Which is kind of a dealbreaker.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#36
post #20

Every few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for the owner. 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 i…

Thanks for your awesome work ! I guess when the WebTorrent protocol will be implemented in libtorrent, suddenly, everything is going to change. Right now it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but I'm really confident your project will enable a whole new class of applications which are not possible to build easily currently.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#37
post #29
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything right? Except of course monitize it. Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much harder.

Do you mean monetization and making a business are the main goals? I thought they were means? Means to accomplish progress in human society.

Is that what your boss tells you whenever you ask for a raise ?

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.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#38
post #12

You know the traditional business model of Hollywood is well and truly broken when an open source application like Popcorn Time comes along and does everything right. What Popcorn Time has done by making accessing content on demand easier than ever before is nothing short of impressive. 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).

Everything right? Except of course monitize it. Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much harder.

Coinado will require payment after beta period. We'll see how it goes...

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#39

> Coinado is a remote torrenting service. We do the torrenting for you, worry about seeding, keep your privacy and deliver the file over an encrypted connection. Requesting a file is simple. You just append the info hash of the torrent to the Coinado domain and when you start the download, the torrenting happens transparently on our servers and a minute later the file starts streaming to you. That sounds like a solid…

Will be very interesting to see how this develops. They can't be hit with DMCA takedowns since they don't actually host any content, and unlike torrent sites they don't even index it themselves, so there's literally nothing for regulators to take down. They just turn torrents into HTTP downloads.

All the same, I can't see the media companies letting something like this grow to a reasonable size. It'll be interesting to see what the attack is when it comes.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with streaming film services is distribution rights not software. Even netflix, the poster child of film streaming, struggles with this same problem.

But that is only a problem that the movie industry itself keeps alive because it refuses to move past the idea of creating false scarcity.

Oh no, not that price scarcity theory again.... A van gogh isn't more expensive than my drawing because they're rarer or built with rarer materials. Intrinsic value is much more complicated and subtle than that... Giving money for something is also a mean to encourage people to produce more content, for example. It's also a way to say "thank you, keep going on please".

edit : or maybe that's what you meant too, in which case i'm sorry for the comment.

Post reply on HN