I immediately quit the application as it should not be so easy to benefit from someone else's hard work without compensating them.
Please, movie people, let me pay for this.
You might kill the cinemas, but you'll still get paid.
Nonsense. I benefit from the work of Mozart and feel no need to compensate anyone. There are real issues with funding mechanisms and creative work in a shareable digital world, but we can reject the idea that you should always pay for anything that is beneficial. If you want to give gifts to creative folks you like, you can go ahead.
There are many ways this system is currently broken (e.g. copyright lasting 70 years after creators death in US), but the fundamental concept of incentivizing creation of works that ultimately provide public benefit is sound.
"I should just get for free things that other people make because how dare they charge. If they're greedy enough to want to make money for their work, then they should follow a business model I set forth here and only make money by donations or selling other things I'm not going to buy anyway. Because freedom."
Even on legal side you are not required to compensate anyone as it's so old that it's in public domain.
Well, Mozart is dead, for one thing...
That's all I said. The rest of my comment acknowledged that the economics and funding for movies is complex.
All the copyright apologists are so defensive, it's absurd. It's like you can't accept dropping any of your arguments, even when they are pointed out as plainly wrong. You are so worried that your whole case is ill-founded and won't be able to keep your position if you accept any criticism at all.
There might actually be some valid points on the pro-copyright side, but we don't get to see them if you keep defending the obviously invalid arguments…
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ICSVLPA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/12-years-a-slave/id7403669...
And many others: http://www.foxdigitalhd.com/12-years-a-slave
Sony could not have made it any easier to get this film into your living room.
(Regardless, I don't think media companies have an obligation to make their content available to anyone, anywhere.)
iTunes: I don't see renting option.
Fox Digital: "United States Brazil Mexico Canada Italia Australia Deutschland Belgium Holland United Kingdom España France"
ARRRR!
iTunes has won! I guess I will be watching it this weekend :)
1. Someone comes up with an idea for a movie 2. They approach someone with money to create the movie 3. Monied person gives idea person $X to make the movie with the assumption that they will receive back $X + $Y (ignoring Hollywood accounting). 4. Movie is made. People are paid out of $X 5a. Movie is successful. Monied person receives back $X + $Y 5b. Movie is unsuccessful. Monied person receives back $X - $Z
None of this simplified hypothetical happens without the idea or the monied person. The idea person makes an arrangement that allows them to realize their idea and make some coin. The monied person... Well, he just cares about money. So he wants to make more.
If movies are perpetually unsuccessful, guess what happens? The monied person ends up investing in something else, leaving the idea person out of luck.
I do agree with some of the other people on here that piracy puts pressure on the business people to improve access.
Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).
Has anyone ever implemented this?
When I'm at work, I only watch TV as background noise. I rarely get a chance to go to the movies proper nor do I get the time to sit and watch a movie at home. This is the only reason I have Netflix.
This is specific to me and I wouldn't claim to generalize this to a whole population.
Pay for what, the ability to stream a movie? Don't we already have a dozen options for that?
I don't think this interesting as a feature, it's the backend technology that's interesting. On a related note, Spotify does something similar to get music to listeners by having existing users upload to new listeners.
Movie theaters offer neither convenience nor comfort. It's 2014, not 1914. Further, they are epicenters of disease transfer and otherwise completely and utterly dominated by inconsiderate jackasses who, to the benefit of everyone else, should actually probably stay at home.
It's hard to imagine that we live in a world where something so absurdly ancient is still the norm. They want us to endure that AND to pay $13 to watch a new movie. The 400% ROI on the first weekend of release isn't enough, they then want us to pay $20 to "own" the movie at home (and by own, I mean have access to watch it, because they learned that it's really bad to ever give anyone an actual copy of anything, because copyright law actually then prevents them from making even more money later on). Then maybe at some arbitrary point in the future, you can pay to watch a movie once, but for $5. Long after that movie is irrelevant. As a last attempt to extract money from a dead thing, and only as an attempt to make more money. It's in no way about your convenience, nor access to the work.
Imagine if music was still the same way. For every new work, radio stations are prevented from broadcasting the music at all. You have to go to an audio theater where you will sit in an uncomfortable chair with food stuffs splattered all over the floor, all the while battered from all directions with ads and menus for overpriced food and drink for "your enjoyment." You will listen using headphones that have clearly not been cleaned in a month, next to a person with a screaming child and another person who just sneezed a fine mist over 40 sq ft, much of which landed all over your face. Now you can listen to the latest and greatest the music industry has to offer. And oh yes, for this fine pleasure you WILL pay $13. No option just to hear the cover, not even at a reduced price. This is, after all, the bastion of decadence, a truly wondrous place where you should feel privileged to have access to the latest and greatest in entertainment! This is how kings live, and you'll like it!
Then 3-100 months later, chosen arbitrarily, you'll be given the "option" of having access to listen to that music whenever you wish for a mere $10 fee, and 18-500 months after that, finally, radios can start playing it, but only if they pay enormous sums of money to the copyright holders, which requires them to ask you for a subscription fee. What the fuck? You want to listen to music for free on the radio? LOL. Shut the fuck up and listen to my ads.
Clearly that model wouldn't work for music. They tried it, and it failed, so they actually adopted a better model, or rather they got out of the way and let innovators make things so convenient that piracy has become a mere historical oddity. I don't remember the last time I've even heard of someone pirating music.
So why do we still have these evil fucks insisting it works for movies? It very, very clearly doesn't. Piracy is a clear symptom of this. What happens when piracy becomes so easy and so simple that the barrier to entry gets lowered to nothing, so that everyone is suddenly able to experience availability as it should be? My sincerest hope is that it kills the profitability of the movie industry as we know it. Maybe then it may be replaced with something that actually places value in the consumer and their interaction with the work, not solely in the work itself.
Paying these animals only encourages their deviant behavior. If you value a free and open Internet, you will starve Hollywood until it dies.
Hollywood only continues to exist because people like you keep feeding them. Don't feed the animals.
They should allow people to buy and stream new releases online. Then, I think they should use theaters for a mix of new movies, and old movies. Run themes, have 80s week, or classic horror movie week, or Star Wars week, or Hitchcock week.
You're paying the service, not the work done. The work is already payed. The investors now want to make more money and that's all. If they don't know what the consumer wants, i.e. you want to experience this movie on a theather, then they can't win money.
In fact, when you go to cinema, in theory, you're paying the theathers, not the filmakers or the camera man who filmed the movie. Maybe some actors have access to shared profits, but that's pretty rare business nowadays.
I'm tired of the same "compensation" history. What is the minimum compensation they want to leave a fair use? You will find the number can't be wrote down. Everyone wants free compensation for life.
That said, yes, if the same service was proposed at a decent price and with recent releases (even popcorn doesn't get the freshest stuff), i'd totally just pay for it too.
Netflix, prime, etc don't even have stuff that's as recent or of similar quality.. (yes they've some of them)
Can you please flush out this argument a bit?
It sends usage data to Google Analytics. I can see how this can translate into you getting caught. Be careful.
Even if you don't have a 'trackingId' set it still sends GET requests to http://google.com/
It's not proof of piracy. It just proves that some bytes were downloaded. What, for example, if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.comThe binary you download from Mega.co.nz uses "YIFY Torrents" website yts.re exclusively. Github code seems to be actually used. So it all runs via this single webserver (+Google analytics). Just to verify what a installed binary blob does on your Linux box. The ease of use is impressive, a new level for P2P-ish work since Napster/Kazaa/Limewire days.
curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hostsIt's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go
Disclosure: I'm the author.
This product is the closest I've seen to matching that vision. So despite its very obvious illegality, I appreciate the authors' efforts to try and push the UX boundaries around content viewing. Hopefully instead of Hollywood suing the pants off of the creators, they'll use it as a template for what might be possible if they could collectively get their shit together.
That said, I think the cable companies would just jack the rates on internet service to compensate for their dwindling cable usage.
Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of such things? At least these sorts of sites used to pretend they were for things like "public domain movies" and "personal backups."
So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.
An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.
So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.
That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.
>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically
Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.
Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?
If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)
You would need an alternate universe with no torrenting to server as a control for your statement.
Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.
That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.
With typical torrent use, you have to wait the entire download time before you can watch anything because the pieces are randomly selected. But adding streaming just means you have to bias toward the early pieces just enough to have a decent buffer. After that, you can still be random.
The case of prime time seems to be better for this approach, not worse. People still won't all start at the exact same time. The early arrivals will all replicate the early pieces, beefing up the ability of the swarm to get the pieces everybody wants.
I haven't looked at the code, but it seems to me that as long as it's flexible about the amount of time it takes to fill its initial buffer, and as long as it keeps serving after people are done watching (to compensate for the up/down pipe asymmetry), then the swarm would survive just fine.
Indeed, I think making swarm participation much easier and more appealing might increase the depth of resources around any given torrent, making results net better for popular files.
The rarest piece is picked (from the client’s point of view of the swarm)
If two or more pieces have the same rarity, pick one of them at random
Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".
Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).
Can you explain the SEEDING part of it in more details? As your description says it will be seeded for some time to avoid leeching but can you describe this in a little more detail.
I know the project is trying to reduce/remove complexity from the torrent kingdom (its from whatever i see in this beta version i would say they have done a pretty good job!) but I have a (maybe an obvious) suggestion that you guys might want to add a "settings" pane somewhere so that users can play with settings.
The only major criticism i have is that the project is overly depended on YIFY as the provider of content. Which is also a problem because everything is either in 720 or 1080.
I hope some of the more "legal" providers learn from the simplicity of this project.
I hope they add TV shows with a nice interface for browsing seasons.
The cognitive dissonance, it burns.
Maybe it's preferable to keep it as is today: piracy as an option for some and as a force against too much control from the content industry.
To explain, entertainment is fungible, and today we have an embarrassment of entertaining riches: books, hangouts, news, board games, video games, music, TV, social web, sporting events, etc. Almost all of these things can be distributed world-wide at minimal per-unit cost.
Since entertainment is fungible, the competition for for 12 Years a Slave isn't just Dallas Buyers Club, it's also 2048, reddit, Attack on Titan, the Olympics, and whatever piques my interest during a Steam Sale. That sounds like the increase in supply for entertainment is far outstripping the increase in demand.
That's only because the home video market allowed people the luxury to legally watch any existing movie anytime they want, once they have purchased it, without the possibility of the studio revoking permission.
Don't worry - studios are already trying to think of ways to "fix" that (stream-only content that is never released in DVD format is one example)
> Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas
I'd be just as happy if all movies went straight to streaming, I'd even be ok with higher prices closer to the release if they did drop down to reasonable levels after a period of time. I personally have grown to hate going to the theater, I find it much more enjoyable to watch movies in the comfort of my home without people talking, babies crying, and teenage girls on their cell phones the whole time. Not to mention I refuse to pay for concessions which are extremely over priced.
While the frontend is all Backbone, the real magic happens in its backend dependencies like peerflix (https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix) and video.js (https://github.com/videojs/video.js/).
Edit: And, of course, the remarkable (undocumented?) API provided by subapi.com. Check out http://subapi.com/popular.json !
Double Edit: The API appears to be developed by the Popcorn Time people, as per https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294
In the case of the record companies, widespread pirating put pressure on these companies to make their content available online at reasonable prices. In my opinion, piracy is once again providing that pressure, this time on the film production houses. I believe that once the majority of films are available online at reasonable prices, products like Popcorn time will lose much of their appeal.
Look at staggered releases of Movie/DVD/rentals/redbox and the fake scarcity to protect profits.
I know companies need profit... but on the same time, if it really is THAT easy to get movies to people - then it's time for a shakeup that moves the industry forward.
MP3s and napster led to iTunes and other avenues to get music easily AND "Support the Artist".
Maybe we'll get better options out this - other than Netflix (Which I love, but damn it doesn't have a lot of titles) or pick-your-flavor digital locker that may or may not exist next year?
(Compare this to, for example, patents on medical products being used to induce scarcity. The stakes here are life and death - so there is a strong ethical case in favour of ignoring the patents to produce cheaper generic products so they can be supplied to those who would otherwise be unable to pay. As has been done with certain drugs in the developing world.)
you -> [encrypted data] proxy peer -> destination peer
In this case, unless all the proxy and the destination peers are controlled by policing actors they can't know who's downloading what.
Popcorn Time works using torrents, fair enough. Am I seeding while watching a movie?
Indeed, you are. You're going to be uploading bits and bits of the movie for as long as you're watching it on Popcorn Time.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...
Does BitTorrent protocol support ordered downloading? What usually prevents streaming kind of usage is the fact that BitTorrent clients download file blocks without any specific order. If ordering is possible, then any client should be able to do that.
That would be the MPAA actively encouraging infringement in order to then attack the infringers.
It's rare that you'll get enough of the packets at the right places to get a coherent stream going. Especially if you haven't told it to stream from the start of the torrent.
Gonna be interesting to see how this goes, same concept or some cool tech in the background like S3?
I can't think of another way to democratize youtube - the costs of storing and broadcasting petabytes of videos are astronomical, but I think torrenting proves there is a lot of untapped bandwidth in the world you could take advantage of if you mask it over with a nice GUI. I guess that is the real downside of such an idea - it can't work in the browser, unless you implement a torrent client in javascript, and even then you couldn't maintain a local cache.
Why bother.
Such low bitrates do make it easy to stream, but I don't think the site is correct in saying you are watching "the best quality".
This is AMAZING news!!!
I don't think the app really is useful when you weighs the risks.
Hell, when I was a youngin' I wrote FastFlick to make MY life easier. We as hackers are always striving to make things simpler for everyone, but most importantly for ourselves.
Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.
Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
Having said that, I do not know of the developers/people behind this project, so please do not take offense at this if this is misdirected and/or wrong.
It works very similarly to streaming anything. When you think about streaming a video on Netflix, the server sends the movie data to your computer sequentially, so after it downloads maybe the first 4 minutes, your movie starts playing, and while your movie plays it continues to download the rest of the movie.
Streaming via torrent works similarly, except while the movie is playing, you're also seeding.
It's generally frowned upon to download sequentially via a torrent because normally, torrent "pieces" are downloaded randomly to ensure that all pieces are available to everyone evenly. Imagine if everyone were trying to download the same piece at the same time!
That's it in a nutshell!
I mean, both Apple and Microsoft are filthy rich, so what's a few thousand?