Popcorn Times is back from the dead as a new fork of the free movie streaming service, popularly dubbed as the Netflix for Pirates, is alive, kicking and online anew following the series of shutdown in the past weeks. The new site is likely to be taken down again but one thing is sure, reports said, Popcorn Time will rise again.
Following the high-profile shutting down of movie torrents site YTS, operated by the YIFY release group, the Popcorn Time operation from Canada folded up and succumbed to the legal threats coming from Hollywood movie alliance MPAA. Then a Dutch version popped up but only hours after the resumption was announced on Reddit, copyright holders jumped into action and forced the fork out of action.
But unlike the YTS/YIFY group that completely disappeared, Popcorn Time simply refused to die. A new fork is up and running again, Softpedia reports, adding that the latest edition is the product of communal effort.
"The community is now ready to take on the development role, and the identity of the developers will be kept secret. They are also working on a decentralized way of maintaining the application," the report said.
The service can be accessed via the domain popcorntime.ml, which Softpedia said operates under the Community Edition banner. Another domain name that leads to the same service is popcorn-time.se though it's unclear if the two are connected.
The new fork, according to Sofpedia, picked up from where the Dutch developers left off. The fixed application is claimed to work on machines running on Windows, OS X and Linux, the report added.
But the question remains: How long this Popcorn Time fork will remain active? For sure it will be taken down just as quick as the other versions were forced offline, Android Origin said, but that will not be the end of the service.
"The big ace that Popcorn Time has up its sleeve is its open source nature. Users are free to modify and redistribute the source which has actually spawned a couple of clones," the Android Origin report added.