Makers of Popcorn Time launch Butter Project
The makers of Popcorn Time have just launched a new project called Butter which the developers plan to make the backbone that is powering Popcorn Time but without the legal issues facing the former.
One of the main ideas behind Butter is to provide developers with a perfectly safe way to contribute to the infrastructure that powers Popcorn Time (and other applications utilizing Butter in the future), without being associated with Popcorn Time at the same time.
So, instead of maintaining a single project -- Popcorn Time -- that features it all, they have split up the project into the two parts Butter and Popcorn Time.
Butter is created so that anyone can contribute to great desktop and mobile apps that allows to stream movies and shows from Bittorrent (and other sources, but more on that later) in a stylish and easy way.
Popcorn Time will provide users with the experience it is providing them now with and users of the app can use it like they do currently.
Butter offers everything that made Popcorn Time great but the direct integration of pirated TV shows and movies.
That does not mean that Butter won't feature capabilities to customize what is being shown and streamed.
The current version ships with content from Vodo, an independent service offer free films. In the future, additional -- free and legal-- services may be added to Butter.
Not only an empty shell, we want to make Butter a great App if you want to stream independent cinema and tv shows.
One potential target here is the movie offering of Archive.org but there are others out there that the developers may integrate.
Butter is not available in binary form currently but that is about to change. The developers plan to make another announcement soon and it is very likely that this will be about the first binary release of Butter.
It will be interesting to see how this will work out for the Popcorn Time team. Developers who did not want to work on Popcorn Time but are interested in helping develop Butter are effectively improving the backend of Popcorn Time at the same time. The Popcorn Time team noticed a drop in contributions after it moved away from GitHub after copyright concerns.
Closing Words
Even if you disagree with what Popcorn Time is offering, I think it is fair to say that it help showcase how great and easy streaming media services could make it for users.
The new development strategy could add new blood to the project that is working on the backbone exclusively.
Now you: Have you tried Popcorn Time?
As more pay streaming services start up (Disney and Youtube are just the most recent new entrants to the market), I suspect something like this will becoming incredibly popular. Not just because it’s free (though obviously that’s a big incentive for users), but because it’s just one app you can flip on and find what you are looking for. Cable-cutting became a thing because a service like Netflix offered so much content for a reasonable price, getting away from the high-price, low-quality packages and constantly changing libraries of cable services. A lot of users seem to be getting sick of juggling accounts with Netflix, Hulu, Prime and more as the content libraries fragment and the distributors once again try to become gatekeepers by forcing ‘exclusives’ on different services.
In short, they didn’t learn their lesson the first two times. Nobody wanted to buy a CD for $15 in a record shop and be told it was illegal to put it on their iPod when a song could be downloaded (for free or for pennies) at the speed of light. Nobody was going to buy a region-locked DVD at $20-30 when they could download a torrent for free or stream it for pennies a day. Hence iTunes and Netflix, but distributors and publishers are always determined to continue the principle of artificial scarcity.
Yeah fragmentation is a big issue. If you get subscriptions for three or four services, not only do you pay $40 or more, you also need to switch between them depending on what you want to watch and which service offers it. That’s bad on many levels and one of the main reasons why I’m not subscribed to any of those (not that I watch much TV anyway).
It is actually cheaper for my viewing habits to simply buy DVD or Blu-Ray releases when they come out instead.
Popcorn Time has closed down, servers, web, apps…