14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, no one can stop the ever growing "Popcorn Time" community of movie pirates, as after an iOS Installer was released to allow users to install the Popcorn Time app on their iPhone or iPad devices from a Mac or Windows machine, there's now a browser-based video streaming service too.
Already dubbed "The Netflix of Movie Torrents" or “Netflix for Pirates" by several media websites that have reported the news today, the new Popcorn In Your Browser service allows anyone to watch movies streamed via torrent websites directly from their web browser, no matter the operating system used.
The respective website has a very simple design that features a welcome screen with some movie suggestions and a search box. The search results are being displayed to users in real time, and all you have to do to watch a torrent movie, which is illegal in some countries, is to click an entry.
Users are immediately redirected to another page, where a proprietary embedded video player will allow them to watch the respective movie. There are no other options, such as the ability to choose the quality of the video - what you see is what you get. A fake progress bar will display some funny messages until the video starts to play, and there's a home button that returns you to the initial screen.
Watching pirated movies is still illegal in many countries
As we've mentioned above, watching pirated movies is still illegal in many countries, despite the fact that these new "Popcorn Time" technologies are becoming easier to use with each day. Last month, we learned that the UK High Court told local ISPs to ban the Popcorn Time application, following complaints from MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) over pirated contented.
Most probably, more countries will take the same action in the near future, as MPAA will (most probably) force them to block the Popcorn Time application. However, many torrent websites are still available these days, and new ones appear every time MPAA closes other similar websites.
UPDATE: The service has been shut down. The following message is being shown to all visitors:
"Popcorn in Your Browser is no more. It relied on the free trial of remote torrenting service Coinado.io, which I used to stream YIFY torrents to an HTML5 video tag. This site went viral and seems to have completely overwhelmed Coinado's servers, who in turn promptly discontinued the free trial. :-) It was fun while it lasted - cheers!"