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What's bizarre to me is how casually "non tech" people in Singapore refer to watching stuff on "Popcorn Time."

userbinator 11y ago
Around a decade or more ago, when P2P filesharing was really popular, average "non tech" people were speaking of Kazaa, Limewire, etc. and all the "free stuff" they could get from them.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  And of course Napster, which was so popular even several movies and TV shows of the period referenced it (e.g. The Italian Job (2003)).
zyxley 11y ago
Why? The whole point of the app is to be as convenient as possible. Heck, it's got better design than services like Netflix or Amazon when it comes to looking through TV shows.
- seiji 11y ago
  Well, it's like saying people download stuff "from bittorrent." It's like saying you download music from TCP. How people talk: "Where did you get this music?" "Oh, I got it from bittorrent." People aren't nuanced enough to know the difference between an indexing service, an application, a protocol, and various implementations or instances of all combinations thereof.
  - sushid 11y ago
    But there is/was an app called Bittorrent, right? I think that might add to the confusion for the typical layperson.
    - userbinator 11y ago
      There's also uTorrent, xTorrent, and a variety of others with names ending in *torrent. "I torrented it" was, and might still be, quite a common expression because of that. Probably for the same reason "I HTTP'd it" never became established because people were already using their browsers for regular downloads over HTTP.
conanbatt 11y ago
Argentina had a precursor to Popcorn time called Cuevana. They showed up in 2010 I think and it was word-of-mouth widespread. I was told about it in a bar by an adjacent table. From it, you could get episodes that had been aired hours before, with subtitles, with online streaming. It spread like wildfire because it was orders of magnitude easier than going to Pirate Bay(which is a terrible experience). I dont know how pop popcorn time actually is in Argentina itself since none of my friends use it, and installing the app was a bad experience for me and my gf: nevertheless a famous phone carrier published a 4G connection ad saying : "eat popcorn in 4G".

Around a decade or more ago, when P2P filesharing was really popular, average "non tech" people were speaking of Kazaa, Limewire, etc. and all the "free stuff" they could get from them.

Someone1234 11y ago
And of course Napster, which was so popular even several movies and TV shows of the period referenced it (e.g. The Italian Job (2003)).

zyxley 11y ago

Why? The whole point of the app is to be as convenient as possible. Heck, it's got better design than services like Netflix or Amazon when it comes to looking through TV shows.

seiji 11y ago
Well, it's like saying people download stuff "from bittorrent." It's like saying you download music from TCP. How people talk: "Where did you get this music?" "Oh, I got it from bittorrent." People aren't nuanced enough to know the difference between an indexing service, an application, a protocol, and various implementations or instances of all combinations thereof.
- sushid 11y ago
  But there is/was an app called Bittorrent, right? I think that might add to the confusion for the typical layperson.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    There's also uTorrent, xTorrent, and a variety of others with names ending in *torrent. "I torrented it" was, and might still be, quite a common expression because of that. Probably for the same reason "I HTTP'd it" never became established because people were already using their browsers for regular downloads over HTTP.

conanbatt 11y ago

Argentina had a precursor to Popcorn time called Cuevana. They showed up in 2010 I think and it was word-of-mouth widespread. I was told about it in a bar by an adjacent table. From it, you could get episodes that had been aired hours before, with subtitles, with online streaming. It spread like wildfire because it was orders of magnitude easier than going to Pirate Bay(which is a terrible experience). I dont know how pop popcorn time actually is in Argentina itself since none of my friends use it, and installing the app was a bad experience for me and my gf: nevertheless a famous phone carrier published a 4G connection ad saying : "eat popcorn in 4G".