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posted by janrinok on Friday March 28 2014, @10:35AM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28 2014, @08:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28 2014, @08:18PM (#22675)

    Don't have the energy? I find the legal way more complicated than the illegal ones.

    If you want to do it legit, you have to suffer all sort of DRM, crappy web players, buffering, competing stores with exclusivity. Some sites / stores simply don't work on my smart tv or my WDTV. There is often advertisement even for payed material. It's completely ridiculous.

    With the illegal way: Click magnet link, few seconds after I can stream it to VLC or any other video player in my house. I can stop and resume the video whenever I want on the devices I want. I can keep the file for later or to watch offline.

    Pirating always work, all the time, flawlessly.