It has never been so easy to watch popular movies and TV shows on your computer without having to buy them, all made possible by the widely popular application Popcorn Time. The app, described as “Netflix for pirates,” uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol to stream movies in a fashion similar to other networks used by media pirates to get the movies they want. Of course users who watch copyrighted works (which is the mainstay of the app) violate the law when they do so–but that has not hurt the sheer popularity of the program.

According to BGR.com, Popcorn Time just got easier to watch: it’s now coming to the browser without the need for a plugin.

The new website is called Browser Popcorn and is a fork of the Popcorn Time project.

Visitors are greeted with a layout extremely similar to Popcorn Time with available movies displayed just like the app, except that genres and categories appear on the site. By clicking on one of the movie covers the details slide in from the side including a big “WATCH IT NOW” button. The selected movie starts immediately upon clicking that bottom. (It even works on a Chromebook!)

Once the movie viewer is running, watchers can pause, play, seek, and exit back to the main page.

It’s an all-in-one copyrighted media streaming service all available as a web app.

Trouble in PopcornTime.io city

Arguably the most popular Popcorn Time fork, the desktop application available from PopcornTime.io, has had a bit of a shakeup as rumors surfaced that several key developers have left. According to an article on TorrentFreak, the breakup happened over the integration of VPN.ht, an encrypted network service that protects users privacy, which had become a major revenue stream for the client.

Of course, being that Popcorn Time is a piece of software used in the furthering of lawbreaking, as copyright infringement is against the law, the fact that the developers were making money off it, via subscriptions to the VPN service, caused fears that it would make the app a bigger target.

The large copyright cartels (the Motion Picture Association of America aka MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America aka RIAA ,for example) have kept their knives sharp when hunting new technologies that could be used to pirate movies.

The battle over file sharing and copyright has been a long and storied tradition that started with the obliteration of Napster in 2001. Then in 2010, the peer-to-peer music service LimeWire found itself in the crosshairs and was eventually shut down. In the subsequent years, the rise of BitTorrent and peer-to-peer protocols made it more difficult for copyright associations to strike at software makers, so instead they began to more often target users and websites that just offered links to torrents (not actual files). The website The Pirate Bay has been on the forefront of actions against it by the RIAA and MPAA in an attempt to shut down its efforts for years.

Looking at what has happened to the founders of The Pirate Bay–which, as mentioned, only hosts links to download media and not the files themselves–the developers of Popcorn Time have very real reasons to be paranoid.

The PopcornTime.io client is still the most popular fork of the software and while it is still in beta (version 3.8.5) it is still an extremely solid piece of programming. Users seeking to watch their fill of new releases can do so on Mac OSX 10.7 and later, Windows 7 and later, Linux (32 and 64 bit), Android 4.0.3 and later and on Android TV.

Featured image credit: https://browserpopcorn.xyz/ screenshot