Most famous Popcorn Time fork goes offline permanently

By admin On Oct 23, 2015

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The developer of PopcornTime.io, the streaming service’s most popular fork, has confirmed to TorrentFreak that it has taken the servers offline. Since Monday, the service has been struggling with downtime and there have been rumors of a ‘break-up’ of the team.

“PopcornTime.io is dead,” reads the streaming service’s status page. The website has been unavailable or barely accessible since Monday, but the fork is now permanently offline. Developer Wally tells TorrentFreak that he has permanently shut down the servers, removing all logs that could harm other developers.

Last Monday, word came out that a number of key developers had left the PopcornTime.io team for fear of an impending lawsuit. There would also be internal disagreements about the link with VPN.ht. Linking to this VPN service generated revenue, potentially making PopcornTime.io a bigger target for lawsuits.

The .io domain is said to have been under the control of one of the departed members. As a result, PopcornTime.io lost control of the domain. A request to transfer it to a new owner was denied by provider Gandi.net.

Not only is the website down, but also the infrastructure behind the service is no longer working or barely works. YTS’s torrent site, also known as YIFY, has been offline for days. Most Popcorn Time applications use the torrents of this release group as their main source, which makes it difficult for users to stream movies or series.

Earlier this week, Popcorn Time’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were also removed. However, the Twitter account is back and on it reports the service: ‘this is probably our last status update, please support our legal Butter project’. The developers announced that project earlier on Friday.

This week, BrowserPopcorn was also repeatedly in the news, a website that lets you watch movies in the browser. On Wednesday, this service was closed by the fifteen-year-old maker himself, later the message went that the site has been taken over by another developer and has been moved to a new domain. However, BroserPopcorn.biz is now showing a ‘coming soon’ message and it is not clear if that will actually happen.

While PopcornTime.io, the main fork, is now presumably offline for good, that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the streaming service. Alternatives such as popcorn-time.se appear to be still operational.