Online piracy is big news in South Africa at the moment but elsewhere in the land of the internet, a new, more glamorous way to torrent movies has been born. Meet Popcorn Time, a new application that started out as a project from an Argentinian designer who wanted to make torrenting movies as easy as watching Netflix.
While we could never condone filesharing without the appropriate permissions from rights holders, what Popcorn Time has achieved is impressive.
In practice Popcorn Time is actually a very simple combination of a collection of separate APIs, which are the pipelines that developers use to access information from other platforms, like using Facebook to sign into Tinder. There are APIs for the movie details and posters, subtitles and of course the torrents themselves. which come from one of the largest torrent uploading sites on the internet YTS. All of the information is combined together in a single, simple to use interface for the end-user.
That simple to use interface involves a search bar at the top with a list of genres down the left hand side for navigation and an area with all of the movie posters on the right hand side. Clicking on any movie’s poster gives you the description and rating for the movie along with a rating. It allows you to choose between 720p and full high-definition streaming and lets you know what subtitles are available before you click the big ‘Watch It Now’ button. Like YouTube, the app requires a bit of buffering to be done in the background while it downloads the first part of the movie to your hard drive in order to start streaming it.
The difference between Popcorn Time and traditional streaming services like YouTube or Netflix, is that once the video is completely downloaded it stays on your system’s hard drive for some time while it is uploaded back to the BitTorrent community to avoid ‘leeching’, a term used to describe people who download only without uploading for others.
You should also note that Popcorn Time makes no effort to protect your privacy. Don’t expect to use it for nefarious purposes and get away with it.
While the service is simple enough to use and has no region restrictions, like Netflix does, however Popcorn Time does warn you when you first start it about the fact that using it to watch protected materials may not be legal in your country. The developer, Sebastian does say that “We (they) don’t expect legal issues. We (they) don’t host anything, and none of the developers makes (sic) any money. There are no ads, no premium accounts, and no subscription fees or anything like that. It’s an experiment to learn and share,”
Source: TorrentFreak
