Popcorn Time, the app that was as soon as fashionable for making pirating motion pictures as simple as watching Netflix, has shut down. Its unique builders took the service down and deserted the undertaking merely a number of days after it launched in 2014. But for the reason that undertaking was open supply, different builders had been in a position choose up the place they left off, and it has been killed and revived a number of extra occasions ever since. It stays to be seen whether or not Popcorn Time is now gone for good, however it seems like the most important contributor to its most up-to-date demise is the dwindling curiosity within the app.

On its web site, the builders posted a graph of “popcorn time” searches over the previous seven years. While the app loved a ton of searches within the months after its launch in 2015, the graph reveals a pointy decline in curiosity by 2016. Its recognition continued to wane, and it by no means actually recovered after that, no less than based mostly on Google Trends. 

According to Bloomberg, the group behind Popcorn Time introduced its closure in an e mail. While they did not say whether or not legislation enforcement motion was an element behind their determination to close down the app this time round, Popcorn Time has had brushes with the legislation up to now. The unique model might have closed after authorities received concerned, and Hollywood studios even sued particular person customers who allegedly downloaded and shared copies of films illegally. 

Developers related to Popcorn Time beforehand talked about how they are not chargeable for piracy themselves, as a result of the service does not really host any content material. Instead, it relied on a peer-to-peer sharing system and solely offered a method for customers to entry content material hosted on different folks’s computer systems.