mendax writes:
A New York Times op-ed reports:
A team of web designers recently released an astonishingly innovative app for streaming movies online. The program, Popcorn Time, worked a bit like Netflix, except it had one unusual, killer feature. It was full of movies you'd want to watch. When you loaded Popcorn Time, you were presented with a menu of recent Hollywood releases: "American Hustle," "Gravity," "The Wolf of Wall Street," "12 Years A Slave," and hundreds of other acclaimed films were all right there, available for instant streaming at the click of a button.
If Popcorn Time sounds too good to be true, that's because it was. The app was illegal - a well-designed, easy-to-use interface for the movie-pirating services that have long ruled the Internet's underbelly. Shortly after the app went public, its creators faced a barrage of legal notices, and they pulled it down. But like Napster in the late 1990s, Popcorn Time offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we've all felt when settling in for a night with today's popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft's media stores: They just aren't good enough.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28 2014, @02:24PM
Streaming is such a pain in the ass I don't use it. Every few months for years(!) I try to stream, and it's just so inconvenient I give up. We should be able to grab a membership at a legal, not-too-evil company, browse to blah.com, rent a movie for $1 or less for 48 hours, and have it play without ANY TECHNICAL ISSUES over WiDi or HDMI to our bigscreen. I've never found such a thing in the US. I've found many claiming such abilities; I've found many people claim online "it works for me!", but I've never found such a thing. I just borrow DVDs from the local library. Maybe one day.....