Popcorn Time is dead again. The developers behind the platform announced Tuesday that they had retired due to a decline in public interest. A visit to the project's website shows an illustration of a dead popcorn box and a graph showing declining interest over time. The developers of the project sent out emails to press outlets to confirm the site's demise.
Popcorn Time will likely be the last time, but this isn't the first time. In March of 2014, a development team launched the illegal video torrenting platform. The app, which was created as an open-source project, used the same technology as the popular streaming service, and it worked with most popular operating system families.
The project was instantly popular because of the prospect of free, torrent-able movies on an easy-to-use interface. After only a week, Popcorn Time was forced to shut down due to law enforcement action, but its admirers immediately reworked its code into various versions, and the project has lived on ever. The most recently retired version was launched in early 2020 just in time for the Covid-19 epidemic, when everyone had nothing better to do than sit around and watch silly videos.
The app has always been fraught with difficulty because it is illegal to download and stream copyrighted movies, and it is also illegal to stream them in a legal gray zone. Popcorn Time is often the subject of legal disputes because of the illegal nature of the app and the threat it poses to the entertainment industry. The app inspired a bizarre lawsuit in which 11 unlucky people were sued for using it to download a bad movie. Aurous got sued into oblivion by the Record Industry Association of America, after Popcorn Time spawned a music industry equivalent. Multiple countries have banned the web domain associated with the application and in some cases people have been arrested and charged with telling people where to find it on the web.
