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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: 3, Interesting) by umafuckitt on Friday March 28 2014, @08:44PM
There was a really awesomely dumb trailer on the Showtime DVDs for the penultimate season of Dexter. They force you watch a minute or two of snippets from Showtime shows each time you enter any of the DVDs from the box set. You can't skip it. The real issue, however, is that one of the snippets they show you is a spoiler for what happens at the end of the season. So if you watch the trailer you've lost the surprise. Big backlash about this on Amazon comments.