“EURid tried to take us down and instead of doing so, they just opened our eyes and made us better and wiser. Download and enjoy.” The project team told Torrent Freak: The project’s frontpage proudly states: “This PopcornTime service will never be taken down. In the future, all the necessary data for Popcorn Time will be transferred purely via P2P and the new Beta 5 implements the infrastructure needed for this vision. With today’s release of Beta 5, the user interface is loaded from redundant servers in parallel, which is a step toward the final goal – distributing all data via P2P transfers. BitTorrent transfers don’t depend on central servers, but the Popcorn Time fork required the central server to load the user interface, so that the application stopped working. The developers were informed that the suspension was the result of an ongoing legal investigation into the BitTorrent streaming app, presumably after copyright holders complained.Īside from losing its domain name and losing nearly all traffic, the domain troubles also affected existing users. Out of the blue had its domain name suspended by the EURid registry.

Last month one of the most popular Popcorn Time forks ran into trouble. The program was abruptly taken down by its original developers on March 14, 2014, but was subsequently forked and taken over by other developers.

Strictly speaking, Popcorn Time is not streaming (BitTorrent streaming is still a research area), but sequential downloading offers a streaming-like experience that is good enough in practice.įollowing inception, Popcorn Time quickly received unexpectedly positive media attention, with some comparing it to Netflix due to its ease of use. The program is intended as a free alternative to subscription-based video streaming services such as Netflix. Popcorn Time is an open source BitTorrent client that includes a media player. Popcorn Time, the BitTorrent video streaming service, has taken a small step along the distributed way. It’s evident that we need decentralized, distributed services without central single point failures.

The recent news about the crackdown on Silk Road 2.0 are a reminder that, as long as Web services depend on central servers, they can be shut down by Big Government and Big Capital anytime.

Popcorn time is safe