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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?
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).
Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much harder.
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?
*: random country in the EU
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.
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.
I love the idea, but what about copyright issues? It's easier for Hollywood to take down a single site than to take down thousands of people having an installed application. Other than that - great implementation. I didn't know this was even possible! Good job.
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.
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.
Does not appear to work, at least not on an iPad. Media player either does not start playback or issues a timeout.
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.
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.
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: