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Popcorn Time in Your Browser

popcorninyourbrowser.net

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Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#101

Post by lars »

martingordon wrote: post #80
DigitalSea wrote: post #7

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).

How does this differ from iTunes? There's a business model that works, and the experience is pretty much exactly like Popcorn Time, except iTunes has those pesky Rent/Buy buttons.

At least with iTunes for Windows, the experience is pretty horrid. I've found iTunes to be extremely hard to navigate, and generally difficult to use. Aesthetically, the app looks like a mix between an OSX app and a website, very out of place on a Windows machine. The UI is slow and unresponsive. It seems like every time I open the app, it wants to update, with a new EULA for me to read. They used to bundle the installer with unwanted crap. Somehow whenever I want to buy a movie, I need to click through 3 or 4 dialog boxes to confirm the purchase. The download I finally get is DRMed, and wont play on my devices.

In general iTunes manages to be bad in almost all ways software can be bad. In my mind, it's one of the worst applications I've had to deal with in recent years.

Imagine a world where content providers made content available for purchase over an open protocol, and allowed anyone to build apps to buy content on top of it. With real competition on the app side of things, non-piracy apps would be more usable than Popcorn Time, and things like iTunes would die in a heart beat.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#102

Post by shawabawa3 »

tmikaeld wrote: post #75
shawabawa3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinado should be legal as far as I can tell - in the same way a torrent client is perfectly legal. They may have to respond to takedown requests or similar though, but seeing as how they only know the hash it will be a lot easier for them to claim ignorance I'm not sure what your privacy concerns are... You can track clients downloading torrents pretty easily, if anything this would help as it adds another layer of…

They are providing direct streams/links to the downloaded files on popcorn. The issue is that that has nothing to do with torrents - it's a direct link to the FILE of the movie, plain and simple.

Oh, i'm sure popcorninyourbrowser is totally illegal and will probably be shutdown soon.

coinado seems like it should be ok though

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#103

Post by ikeboy »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #64
FeepingCreature wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that it's easy to get a false dichotomy here, to think it's just between "paying" and "not paying" - if forced, people also have the simple option to "not watch". I think what's needed is something like Steam or GOG, but for Movies. Preferably with un-DRM downloads because fuck if I'm watching movies in Flash. (Same goes for Silverlight - mplayer or fuck you. Torrents let me watch with mplayer. On finicky graphi…

>> "Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download" Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one? There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are re…

Is there a single legal way of buying movies without DRM?

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#104

Post by bsaul »

smhg wrote: post #87
bsaul wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My comment was not meant to participate in the free vs paid discussion. That's indeed a whole other thing. Your question itself, snarky or not, makes me sad. Doesn't that imply you spend a large part of your day doing something you don't like just for the sake of making money?

why do you assume me asking for money means i didn't like doing it ?

i'm asking for money because i think what i'm doing has value not because i didn't like doing it. And the fact that people like it so much they're ready to pay for it makes it even more enjoyable to me.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#105

Post by k-mcgrady »

rmc wrote: post #76
k-mcgrady wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download" Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one? There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are re…

> There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands All of your options fail either for (a) not working in my country and (b) are physical and non-digital. "Digital content I can watch right away" is not a instanely specific demand.

Regarding (a) I mentioned in my earlier comment that I understood not all of these services were available in all countries. However they are available in a lot of them now. Netflix and iTunes are both available in over 50 countries (I believe it's much higher for iTunes but I can't find the specific figure right now).

As for (b) I don't think that's an insanely specific demand and don't believe I said it was. In fact I listed a few of the demands in my comment. However it's also not a good justification for piracy imo. The content is still available to you with (for most people) very little effort.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#106

Post by k-mcgrady »

1stop wrote: post #65
eli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood isn't in the moving bits around industry. That was never the hard part. It's like saying you improved Photoshop by making a cracked version that's easy to download.... Users might be happy, but imagine you work at Adobe.

That's not really true. The big studios are distributors of the content. They traditionally sold to Cinemas, and had DVDs made, etc. The fact they missed the boat on digital distribution is completely their fault...

They're also investors in the creation of the content.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#107

Post by _lce0 »

dash2 wrote: post #93
xnzakg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you steal a car, the owner doesn't have it anymore. If you would manage to clone a car and then resell it for a fraction of its price, it would mean the car industry is broken.

If the price of a movie were composed out of the cost of the materials for the DVD, this argument would be correct. But the price is needed to compensate the people who made the movie. (I don't say that current movie pricing is equitable.) Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.

> Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.

I wonder how much Hollywood share its revenue with the content creators, not actors but more like writers, filmmakers, and all those that _create_.

are there numbers somewhere?

EDIT: s/studios/filmmakers -- thanks icebraining!

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#108

Post by Sir_Substance »

Narkov wrote: post #12
DigitalSea wrote: post #7

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.

You've fallen into the classic trap:

No one is obliged to give you money. Finding a business model that works is your problem, not your customers.

Forced lock-in is a model, but it's a violent one that makes people want to leave, and it's entirely predicated on there never being an escape hatch for your trapped customers.

There is now an escape hatch for content customers. They're no longer beholden to the choice of cinema or TV for their content, and haven't been for years. Whining about how much more money you made in the old days when people couldn't escape the cage really doesn't enamor you to people.

It's on hollywood to find a new business model that works in a post-cage world. If they can't, they'll go bankrupt and vanish, and I won't care. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of good content out there that's either low investment (think Primer) or can pay for itself in box office and/or merchandising alone (marvel, star wars, lord of the rings).

If your content creation is predicated on selling DVD's or subscriptions, and your DVD/subscription mechanism is so bad people are willingly buying VPN's to other countries to avoid using it (netflix in aus), that's not your customers problem in any fashion, it's yours.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#109

Post by kalms »

Flimm wrote: post #97
Bladegunner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try out a vpn, like hola. (note: only have hola active while you are using it, there are some security risks using it.)

You still need a debit/credit card for that country.

No, actually you don't. When I visit the States, or when using a VPN, I get the US version just fine, at least with Netflix.

Re: Popcorn Time in Your Browser

#110

Post by Ntrails »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #95
DigitalSea wrote: post #7

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).

What exactly can Hollywood learn here? When Popcorn Time produces it's own content and distributes it in a consumer friendly way, then I think Hollywood has something to learn. Until then, this is just theft.

UI, UX, speed, efficacy, control?

Quit with the shitty release schedules, regional locking/delays, etc etc.

There's a lot to learn about what people want to use, now they have to work out how to do something that's as easy but monetised/legal. Netflix did it, and people are willing to pay. Not, perhaps, as much as they'd like though. That's where the real rub is. I won't pay £4 to rent a movie from iTunes. I won't pay £12 for a DvD (full of extras I don't want, unskippable shit and general inconvenince).

Of course, they can always just choose to carry on as before, and assume they can scare people out of doing the easy thing instead of the "right" thing. The larger the gap between the two though - the less likely that is.

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