PopCorn Time, the famous streaming application and real bane of Netflix and Hollywood, has just announced its final closure on Tuesday, January 4, 2022. The news has been confirmed by the group behind the creation of the pirate platform .
It is the end of an epic marked by numerous trials, stunts and multiple returns. But that’s it, the movie industry has managed to bring down one of its main enemies: PopCorn Time. Launched in 2014, pirate streaming app very quickly met with huge success with users. It must be said that the platform allowed access to a vast catalog of recent series and films, to the chagrin of Netflix, Amazon, HBO and others and studios around the world.
Already in 2015, Reed Hasting, the CEO of Netflix, warned its investors against the rise of PopCorn Time : “Piracy remains one of our biggest competitors ”, he assured at the time. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the American justice to attack the platform, leading moreover on numerous occasions to administrative closures of the site.
PopCorn Time, the number 1 enemy of the 7th art
Only, its creators had made sure to leave the code of the application in open-source available on GitHub, thus allowing other developers to create mirror sites and maintain the service. PopCornTime.app, the most important fork of the platform, was also sued in March 2021 by a group of independent studios.
Despite the multiple complaints against them, the creators of Popcorn Time have always claimed not to be responsible for the piracy, the service being content only to host “torrents” links, without directly offering works protected by copyright: “The torrent world was here with millions of users long before us and will be here with billions of users long after us ”, claimed one of the developers in 2015 to our colleagues from the Bloomberg site.
Official ending clap for PopCorn Time
This Tuesday, January 4, 2022, the group behind the application sent an email to many journalists to formalize its final closure. To illustrate this formal farewell, the developers shared an image containing the platform’s famous logo (in mourning this time) along with a board showing PopCorn Time’s share of online searches over the years. .
As a reminder, piracy has always been the pet peeve of the film industry. However, due to the pandemic and the choice of studios to broadcast their films both indoors and on streaming platforms, the phenomenon has amplified. As revealed by our colleagues on the Deadline site on Wednesday, January 5, the illegal downloading of Black Widow would have cost Disney 530 million euros this year.
Source: Bloomberg
