In news that is likely to cause all manner of headaches around Hollywood, Popcorn Time — the streaming torrent service often described as “Netflix for pirates” — is now easier to access than ever, thanks to a new website.
But how long will it last?
Launched in 2014, Popcorn Time has previously been available to Apple users as an app for Macs, Apple TV and iOS. Instead of having to find and download torrents, Popcorn Time makes the whole thing more user-friendly by adopting a streaming click-and-play approach to piracy.
In keeping with this approach, the new Popcorn in Your Browser website lets users simply search for whatever title they want to watch, and begin (free) viewing almost immediately.
Of course, the whole thing is far from legit. While Popcorn Time has so far managed to stay one step ahead of the take-down notices, I’d suspect this is one ultra-simple torrenting site that’s not long for this world.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “Popcorn Time’s new website makes piracy easier than ever”
“Popcorn in Your Browser is no more…”
The reviews for the IOS popcorn are universally bad – it’s more of an ad-soaked game than anything else. And as Eric Aiken posted, the browser popcorn no longer exists. May as well pull this post down because it’s now just irrevelant and wrong.
The Popcorn Time website has been banned in the UK by the High Court & ISP’s are obliged to block it. Many proxies available, of course, and last time I looked my ISP hadn’t yet figured out it needed to block the secure site as well as the unsecured, which just goes to show how inefficient the blocking process is in general.
The site may be down for now, but stating that they’ll be gone eventually is a pretty bold statement in a world where The Pirate Bay stays entirely unidentifiable running on cloud servers where the servers don’t even know they are hosting the site.