Popcorn Time, a cross-platform and BitTorrent-powered movie streaming app, may very well be Hollywood’s worst nightmare. The software can be best described as a Netflix for pirates, allowing users to stream the latest blockbusters at no cost. TF talks to one of the developers to find out how the app came about.

Over the years BitTorrent has become fairly mainstream, with hundreds of millions of people using torrent clients to download the latest entertainment.

Despite its popularity the downloading process can be cumbersome at times, especially for novices. Faced with this challenge Sebastian, a designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina, decided to come up with a piece of software that would make the process as easy as Netflix.

“As a designer I love the challenge of simplification. Take something hard for the common user and make it usable. I have a lot of friends who don’t understand torrents and I wanted to make it easy and effortless to use torrent technology,” Sebastian tells Torrent Freak.

What started out as an experiment for a group of friends soon developed into something much bigger. Popcorn Time now has 20 collaborators on Github and continues to expand at a rapid pace. Developers from all over the world have added new features and within 24 hours it was translated into six languages.

Sebastian explains that Popcorn Time uses node-webkit and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s basically a browser that uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript to serve the movie streams.

“The technology behind the app is very simple. We consume a group of APIs, one for the torrents, another for the movie info, and another for the poster. We also have an API for the subtitles. Everything is automated, we don’t host anything, but take existing information and put it together,” Sebastian says

The torrent files all come from YTS (formerly YIFY), which has an API Popcorn Time taps into. The application can search this database and allows users to stream the torrent on demand. When finished the app will continue to share for a while after the download is finished, to avoid leeching.

For more information and details follow the source link below.

Source: Torrent Freak

Link: Popcorn Time