Why Popcorn Time matters

Spoiler alert — it’s not just about piracy

By now, you’re probably familiar with the story of an app called Popcorn Time. If not, here’s the quick version: a bunch of Argentine developers built a well-designed desktop app that allows you to browse and stream torrents. The legal arm of the entertainment industry reacted to this in exactly the way we’ve come to expect them to, and the founders announced that they were shutting down the project. It then reappeared, (possibly) under new ownership.

There are two reasons that Popcorn Time should interest you. One concerns the glacial entertainment industry’s inability to adapt to changing modes of content consumption. Another concerns Popcorn Time as a starting point for new, interesting interactions.

Part 1: The Past

A lot of noise has been made about what Popcorn Time means for the entertainment industry, but this is beside the point. If all that stands between you and bankruptcy due to unbounded piracy is user experience, it’s time to find a new business model. I’m not postulating on the ethics of piracy — I think that we need to find a modern way to compensate content creators, but that’s for another post. I’m observing that the internet tends to move towards the open transfer of information, and often builds roads around tollbooths.

I think we’ve already seen how this story ends. Limewire makes it ridiculously easy to steal music. iTunes makes it even easier to buy music. Spotify makes it easier still to stream music. Consumers are going to walk the path of least resistance, and they’re not easily swayed by (reasonable) prices or (abstract) legality. If people start using Popcorn Time to illegally stream movies, it won’t be because they don’t want to pay $7.99/mo for Netflix. It will be because they can watch Gravity in 1080p while wearing pajamas, instead of driving to a theatre. It’s only a matter of time before a legal alternative pops up, but this depends on a fundamental change within the entertainment industry.

Part 2: The Future

Popcorn Time is important for another reason — one that only becomes visible once you push aside the highly-charged arguments around piracy. Take a look at the fork count on the popcorn-app github repo:

This means that over two thousand developers have looked at the Popcorn Time app and said “Cool — I’m going to build something on top of that.”

Popcorn Time is the closest thing we have to an open-source platform that nails the modern experience of watching a movie. There are plenty of open-source media players, but none that look anything like Netflix, Hulu+, or any of the other services that we actually use in our day-to-day lives. If you’ve got ideas about how to make it easier to, say, watch a movie with someone on the other side of the country, you’re probably going to prototype that on top of Popcorn Time. I imagine one of those 2,041 developers is already working on this.

From my point of view, having a platform to prototype new ways of discovering and watching movies is significantly more exciting than having a new way to circumvent the laws of a draconian and broken industry. I’m excited to see the things that people build, and I’m even more excited to see how those things make their way into our lives.