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from the we-show-the-movies-you-don't-want-to-watch dept.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28 2014, @07:54PM
> It forced the music industry to change how it sold/delivered music.
Actually, what forced the music industry to wake-up was Apple and the Ipod.
Essentially, in the beginning there was Apple and the Ipod. And the Ipod had DRM. And the music industry wanted to use the DRM. And to use the DRM, they had to sell through iTunes and only iTunes. And so they did.
But then, the great and powerful Apple began to extract a cut of the revenue. And for a while the industry paid the tax. But then, Amazon appeared and offered music sales. And Amazon offered a lower tax cut on the sales. But by this point, the iPod was essentially the only music player remaining in the market. And so, to increase their profits, they desperately wanted to sell through Amazon. But to do so, they had to give up on DRM.
So, after much hand wringing, the desire for more money won out over the desire for DRM, and they started selling DRM free music.
Piracy wasn't much of the effect here.