Popcorn Time for your eyes
Bringing Torrent downloading to the masses
Art Kurasinski (MUSE — YouTube analytics for MCNs, brands and creators) — In the age of hunting and closing down websites offering streaming of movies Popcorn survived not as a startup with a fully developed business model but more of a community project. How does Popcorn’s situation really look like at the moment? Is there an owner, are there employees?
KsaRedFx — Popcorn Time is very much a community project. We live off of the community and we’re only here because of our popularity and our users helping us out every step of the way. As for the internals, the people with the most say are the people who submit the most code, time, and resources. There’s no official owner but those who contribute the most of course are on top.
Art Kurasinski — If I’d like to download a files package and create my Popcorn, can I do that? What is the situation with the copyright to the code and its distribution? Can we say that Popcorn is an open source project?
KsaRedFx — You can actually download our source and create your own clone of the project. However you’re required to have all the code you took from us and anything you added on top of it to be open source and accessable to anyone who uses the application, Popcorn Time is under GPL (General Public Licence) and that means you’re required to follow it.
Art Kurasinski — On what basis does Popcorn currently work? Who bears the costs of servers and updates? Are you asking your users for donations the same way Wikipedia does?
KsaRedFx — Popcorn Time currently is currently riding entirely off of the good will of our team mebers. All of our costs are paid for by a few members of the team, We don’t ask for donations from our users at all, and we don’t even accept them if someone offers. The best donation you can give us is some well written code and some bug squashing. Help make Popcorn Time even better!
Art Kurasinski — After launching the application, there are various movies being displayed on the home page. How are they chosen? Of course, I won’t be able to watch all the movies that are available for download from torrent sites using your application. What is the deciding factor? Quality of the file?
KsaRedFx — We like to say that we have a quality standard for movies. When you load Popcorn Time the content you see is directly from hand picked sources. We want our users to have good quality copies of their content and have it easily and readily accessable. Currently for that because of their level of quality we get our information from YiFy for Movies and EZTV for TV shows… However that could change at any time.
Art Kurasinski — I cannot believe that the lawyers of large corporations such as Warner or Sony don’t come knocking on your door asking you to stop making their movies available. How do you defend against that?
KsaRedFx — The only time that anyone has come knocking at our door was when the MPAA requested that our Github was shut down. We try our best to do the things we do in a way that would make it more difficult to go after us, our goal is to make it next to impossible… But for now we combat large corporations and people trying to shut us down by being globally avaliable and simply putting ourselves back up after someone tries to take us down.
Art Kurasinski — The Polish law allows for using movies, music, books without distributing them but not games or software. Various entities believe it to be a promotion of piracy even though the sales volumes of cinema tickets are increasing from year to year. What’s your opinion — do people watch movies on the Internet and then pay to watch it again at a cinema?
KsaRedFx — In my personal opinion I do think that people watch movies on the internet and then pay to watch them again in cinema, and just as often the other way around. As far as I am aware, people who pirate don’t effect sales in a negative way, last I heard they actually increased sales for various reasons like merchandise and telling their friends how good a movie was.
Art Kurasinski — A lot of people (including myself) believe that services such as Popcorn Time are popular because there aren’t enough services with good content available for everyone regardless of where they live. As a citizen of Poland, I can’t watch movies available on iTunes — the same movies that any American can watch without a problem…
KsaRedFx — Personally I’m also not American. My choices for content are limited at best, I even have to use a proxy in order to access Netflix. It’s infuriating that I am unable to access something or I get blocked by “This isn’t avaliable in your country yet” regularily. I personally don’t think it’s fair and it drives people to pirate more. If I can’t watch it on my TV or I can’t get it on Netflix if I really want to watch something I’ll find a way to get it.
Art Kurasinski — North Korean hackers have attacked Sony because of the film entitled “The Interview”. Sony has stated that they have stopped the distribution of this movie. It appears that the only option to watch it will be downloading it off the Internet. Isn’t that sick?
KsaRedFx — I’m personally not too sure what to think about the whole “The Interview” fiasco with Sony and North Korea, I’ve never seen anything like it and I think North Korea or Sony efforts aren’t going to go far. It’s on the internet now, if someone wants to see it they’re going to see it. North Korea drew more attention to the movie and now I think even more people will watch it then they would have before.
