Popcorn Time, The Movie Pirating Service, Shuts Down

Before Netflix was a service that was available worldwide, people in countries without it had other illegal ways of streaming movies. One of them is Popcorn Time. Or was, since as it turns out the service has shut down.

Visiting the Popcorn Time Site now shows a graph depicting the number of times people have searched for the service. Its heyday was clearly in the 2015 and 2016 window, after which the decline was sharp. Interest in the service continued to slowly decline even further.

According to Bloomberg, the people behind Popcorn Time sent an email to announce its closure. But it’s not the first time it had happened. Its creators abandoned the service after it was introduced. Since it was open source, other people came in and continued keeping it alive and releasing new versions. And it’s likely that, following this closure, it will return in some form or another in the future.

On that note, there’s no mention of the cause behind the closure of Popcorn Time this time around. It’s possible that it may be legal related, as it was back in 2015, according to emails that surfaced following the massive Sony hack back then.

It may also have something to do with the way Popcorn time works in the first place, which is peer-to-peer sharing via BitTorrent tech. With alternatives that stream off servers being dime a dozen these days, they’re likely better received even if the more popular ones have a massive legal target on them.

(Source: Popcorn Time, Bloomberg)

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