> This is becoming less and less important.

That's fine and all, but it's very important today. There were file sharing services before Napster, but Napster became popular after cdrw started being put in desktops you could buy at the local computer store (yes, people went to those back then).

> Even then, my girlfriend could not care less about even having a TV. She watches everything on her computer and is perfectly happy.

Sure, and people have been watching DVDs on their computers for years as well, but is there any data that this trend has gone up to a significant degree, or that watching movies is not still done overwhelmingly on a television?

> That's fine and all, but it's very important today. There were file sharing services before Napster, but Napster became popular after cdrw started being put in desktops you could buy at the local computer store (yes, people went to those back then).

are you forgetting Apple TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, HDMI cables, etc?

Those things are not refined. The primary innovation of Popcorn Time is that it lets you watch torrented movies without knowing the details of how it works. Having a movie being streamed from your computer (eating up battery) and then pushing it to a set top box (all of which are niche products at the moment) or hooking it up through HDMI cables and then having to find your laptop's power supply so you can plug it in right next to the tv.... all of that clunkiness ruins Popcorn Time's primary selling point.

If someone were to build Popcorn Time as an iPhone or Android app that streams to Chromecast / AppleTV, that would be the next logical step, and then we might be able to talk about it being the new Napster.

Sounds like the "No True Napster" argument. Cd players had to be plugged into stereos and speakers, too. Do you recall how unfriendly CD burning software was in the 1990s?

Not that unfriendly for the time. I'll remind you that Napster itself would be considered a UX nightmare by today's standard but for the time it was used by ever high school and college student in the country. Standards change.

They used it because it made content consumption possible. They did anything they could to get the content. There were all kinds of barriers: cables to connect your stereo (everyone did this), CD burning, file management, media players, corrupt files, bad connections, port forwarding details; the truth is it wasn't a great experience, it was simply possible for the vast majority of people to execute, and that was good enough.

it's weird to me you are suggesting Napster was "refined" for it's time, but Apple TV and Chromecast are not currently. it seems like a double standard.

> If someone were to build Popcorn Time as an iPhone or Android app that streams to Chromecast / AppleTV

why does moving Popcorn Time from the desktop iOS environment to the mobile iOS environment suddenly make this more so much more viable? seems like a pretty insignificant detail if you ask me.

Apple TV and Chromecast are refined when playing known-content (from apps). When playing content that is mirrored from a PC there is all sorts of problems. There can often be lag. It eats your PC battery so you have to go find the power supply and find a table to plug in your laptop while you're mirroring.

Can you submit any evidence that a TV is anything more than a bigger computer screen?

My TV has HDMI inputs; if I wanted to move my computer, I could hook my computer up to the TV. Apple has an accessory where the primary selling point (for me) is that it can bounce output from a computer to a TV. There's an entire family of computers where the entire point of them is to be hooked up to TVs and used as media centers.

Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.

> Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.

This was my entire point. People didn't just listen to their Napster-downloaded music on their computer, they listened to them in the car, they brought burnt discs to friends house, etc.

Timing is important. The things you mentioned like Apple TV and HDMI-out are not yet refined. It's not easy, and most importantly, it's not ubiquitous. By the time Napster came out every tower computer came with a CDRW drive.

People don't watch movies in the car, so that part doesn't matter. If you're trying to compare the ease of burning to portable media, tossing an mpeg on a thumb drive is easier and basically as cheap as buying CDs were back in the day. If your only point is that the movie is playing on the screen in the office and not the screen in the living room, I think you're vastly overestimating how much people care but it's not the sort of point I think I can find data to back up, so I'm willing to agree to disagree.

We do have data that says PC sales have been declining for the past several years and are being replaced by tablets. I'd wager that if movies are not being watched on television as much then they're being watched on iPads and other tablets, not laptops. Popcorn Time doesn't run on tablets.

That's actually a good point; tablets have absolutely no utility for me and so I constantly forget that they exist, but lots of people aren't me and apparently think they're pretty great.

If it enables them to watch content, period, people will find a way.

The argument is honestly irrelevant. Popcorn time is a UX leap from what was previously possible. There may be another UX leap in the physical device on which the content is played, but you can't ignore the moon landing just because it didn't happen on Mars.

It's a UX leap, certainly, but Napster was not just a UX leap, it was used by lots of regular people. Is PCT? Even within the subset of users that are torrenting movies, what percentage are doing that through PCT vs. downloading them for later?