New version Popcorn Time can no longer be taken offline

The makers of a popular Popcorn Time fork have introduced a new beta version that, the makers claim, can no longer be taken offline. Recently, the .eu domain of the Popcorn Time fork was taken offline, after which the software stopped working.

The latest beta of the Popcorn Time fork no longer relies on one central server; clients retrieve all metadata, just like the downloads, via peer-to-peer, according to the developers of the software. They want to prevent the service from going offline again, as happened recently when the .eu domain of the creators was blocked by the European registry. The software then stopped working for everyone.

The makers of Popcorn Time tell that they are far from back on the number of users before the domain was blocked. “We grew from 0 downloads to 25,000 downloads per day in the past few weeks,” the team said.

The fork of Popcorn Time, which is being developed by a team calling itself Time4Popcorn, builds on the original Popcorn Time project. That project was taken offline after the film industry allegedly put pressure on the makers. The service allows users to watch movies distributed via BitTorrrent; the software is already playing the movie while the program is still downloading the rest of the file. However, use of the service is prohibited: both uploading and downloading of copyrighted material is only allowed with the permission of the rightholders.

The new version of the banned service will also include an anime and cartoons section, although the latter has yet to be populated. Users can also select which torrent they want to use for a download. In addition, Popcorn Time will soon continue seeding downloads when they arrive; until now that only happened during download. The functionality for this is already present in the beta, but caused problems and has therefore been temporarily disabled. Finally, the new version keeps track of which movies and episodes of series users have already seen.