Popcorn Time, the app that made it easy to watch pirating movies, has shut down. The service was taken down a few days after it was launched. Since the project was open source, other developers were able to pick up where they left off, and it has been dead and revived a few times. It's not clear if Popcorn Time is gone for good, but it looks like the app's waning interest is the main reason for its demise.
The developers posted a graph of searches for popcorn over the past seven years. The graph shows a decline in interest by the end of 2016 after the app was launched in 2015. It never really recovered from its popularity after that, at least based on the trends of the internet.
The group behind Popcorn Time announced its closing in an email. Popcorn Time has had brushes with the law in the past, but they didn't say whether law enforcement action was a factor behind their decision to shut down the app this time around. Hollywood studios sued individual users who allegedly downloaded and shared copies of movies illegally after the original version closed.
Popcorn Time doesn't actually host any content, so the developers aren't responsible for piracy themselves. It relied on a peer-to-peer sharing system to allow users to access content hosted on other people's computers.
This article was originally published on Engadget.
