Makers Popcorn Time announce legal alternative Butter

The makers behind the popular and infamous streaming service Popcorn Time have developed an alternative version of their software, which they say is completely legal. It concerns Butter, a streaming framework in which no references to illegal content are given.

The developers have opened a new website for their project. According to the development team, Butter is a version of Popcorn Time, “without all the parts that make people think.” It is an open source project and, like Popcorn Time, is intended to stream video content to users. To remain out of harm’s way from authorities and copyright holders, no material is offered that requires licensing deals.

According to the makers, there is currently only content from the website vodo.net, but the plan is to add content from other websites in the long term. Users can also choose to stream content themselves via the bittorrent protocol, but in that case they are responsible for it themselves; this makes it possible with Butter to set up your own version of Popcorn Time, which functions out of sight of the original creators.

With Butter, the developers therefore seem to want to focus more emphatically on the underlying technology behind Popcorn Time. This is done, among other things, through a project on Github, to which interested parties can contribute. Because of the copyright problems associated with Popcorn Time, the developers could no longer operate via Github and many software developers no longer wanted to contribute.

Meanwhile, the developers also continue to work on Popcorn Time; that service will remain available. They do emphasize that the infrastructure remains separate from Butter. Those who want to use Butter can visit Github; later the developers will come with ready-made installation files.