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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: 2, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday March 29 2014, @01:09AM
I think the reason is they are after complete control, not immediate profits. I believe that, ironically for one of the few instances they are thinking long term instead of short term, they have it backwards. They are not only missing out on the short term profits, the long term control (and thus even potential greater profit) will likely always elude them as technology keeps developing that end runs their efforts. Unless they succeed in legally locking down the internet to their ends they will ultimately fail. Hopefully sooner than later.