Popcorn time is a desktop application that permits a user to watch movies instantly. In this article I am going to share with you some thoughts about how popcorn time may potentially harm the torrent community.

Popcorn time provides the user a pretty interface showing the available movies in an à la streaming service way (i.e. as NETFLIX etc). Currently the movie titles are the ones ripped and uploaded by the yts.re team (previously YIFI). This includes 720p, 1080p or 3D quality movies. The subtitles and movies meta info are fetched automatically.

As you can see the features and the quality are very rich.

Underneath popcorn time is actually a torrent client that downloads first the first parts of the movie. That way it can play the movie while still downloading it(streaming).

When someone is watching a movie the same time is uploading it to other peers. However when a user finish watching his movie and restart his PC the movie will be deleted.

He won’t continue uploading the movie in the future and if he wants to watch it again he’ll have to download it again.

The easiness of Popcorn time will eventually make users that weren’t as technical as others to start using the bit-torrent protocol to watch movies.

These persons based on my personal experience are persons who aren’t familiar with technology, some times are afraid of it and usually are of an older age.

In addition new generations is very likely to use Popcorn time to watch movies instead of a classic torrent client due to its easiness. This is completely logical as a self taught individual will start using the most appealing and easy technology in his first steps.

Just to continue and make my point I would like to remind you how traditional torrent clients work.

When a torrent is added the client will connect to X other peers. Then he’ll start downloading file chunks from them while in the same time uploading the chunks that it has already downloaded to other users.

When the file is complete the client will continue uploading the file to other users.

It is possible to make the client stop seeding(uploading) the movie after some time but by default most clients upload the file indefinitely. Moreover, many clients default settings make them start in the OS start-up and seed even if there isn’t an active download.

So a seeder is one that has the whole file downloaded and he is uploading it to other users and a leecher is one that has a partial copy of the file and usually uploads the pieces that he has to others(though rarely one may choose not to upload at all if that’s allowed).

So the reason that one is able to download a file is because there are seeders, people who have a whole copy of the file.

Let me give you an example. If a newly created torrent will be seeded for 5 times only by the original seeder, and 5 people come first, download the file and then choose not to seed then the 6th person who will try to download the file won’t be able to do so.

An other impact of leechers is also that even if for example the original seeder continue to seed the torrent indefinitely then the 6th person of the previous example will be able to download the file but in low speed.

So, usually the download speed of a user is much faster than the upload speed. One can download a 700MB file in almost 1hour and 20minutes at 1.20Mb/s but would need almost 10hours to upload it at 150Kb/s.

I have based the above numbers more or less on my internet speed which as far as I know is at least at the moment an average connection for Athens, Greece (speedtest rate my connection with 31ms ping, 7.64Mbps download, 0.58 Mbps upload).

Without even doing the match you understand that if everyone used Popcorn time to watch a movie and right after that exit the application then that would at least affect the quality of the download speed.

Also have in mind that some people will use Popcorn time to watch the same movies more than once.

To conclude I am not using Popcorn time but I find the idea behind it brilliant. I would certainly recommend it to non technical persons or for specific purposes as media centers.

Popcorn time just recently caught my attention (yeah, I know, I may as well leave in a cave:P) and these thoughts were came to me instantly. I am not a bit-torrent protocol expert so my fears may be wrong. Maybe the internet connections will get much better and cheaper really soon or maybe Popcorn time will eventually change its default settings to resemble more the ones of the common torrent clients, who knows! Fill free if you have any comments on my thoughts to leave them below!