Movie-pirating app Popcorn Time, which was once popular for making it as easy as watching Netflix to pirate movies, has been shut down. A few days after the service launched in 2014, its original developers abandoned the project. Since this was an open source project, other developers were able to pick up where they left off, and it has since been killed and revived a few more times. The future of Popcorn Time remains uncertain, but dwindling interest appears to be the main cause of its recent demise.
Their website posted a graph showing “popcorn time” searches over the past seven years. Despite receiving tons of searches in the months following its launch in 2015, the graph shows a significant decrease in interest by 2016. Its popularity continued to wane, and it never really recovered, at least according to Google Trends.
In an email, the group behind Popcorn Time announced its closure. While they did not mention whether law enforcement action played any role in shutting down the app, Popcorn Time has had a number of brushes with law in the past. In addition to shutting down the original version after the authorities got involved, Hollywood studios also sued individual users who downloaded and shared illegally.
Popcorn Time developers have previously explained that they are not responsible for piracy, since they do not host any content. Rather, it was based on peer-to-peer sharing, and allowed users to access content hosted on other people’s computers.
