Popcorn Time has completely changed the way we watch movies and TV series online, but this led it into a direct war with the copyright hawks. The conflict caused contributions to its code to decrease considerably, and in an attempt to improve the situation, those responsible decided to give the green light to Butter, a project that will seek to develop a parallel version of Popcorn Time with authorized content, free of legal problems.
The Collapse of Popcorn Time
Once the genie is out of the lamp, it is practically impossible to put it back, and the web has some forceful examples, like Popcorn Time. What began as a simple experiment became the main option for millions of users to consume series and movies without having to deal with special configurations and P2P clients. Naturally, the film industry and its main allies threw everything they had at Popcorn Time and its variants, with very limited results. The hardest blow that Popcorn Time received overall was its removal from GitHub (something that also affected the rest of the forks), and this reached critical mass last Monday, when its main developers decided to abandon the project out of fear of a million-dollar lawsuit, and due to internal clashes that slowly came to light. The consequences were serious: The PopcornTime.io fork as we knew it ceased to exist, but now something new arrives: Butter.
What Is Butter?
What exactly is Butter? It is a base free from the legal problems that Popcorn Time suffers, so that anyone interested can contribute code without fear of reprisals. The key to achieving this is the absence of compromising content. Its initial source will be VODO, but in the future it is estimated that there will be support for video content on other sites (Archive.org is a good example), and that users will be able to add their own services through plugins. In other words, what was once a single project will now be divided into two: Popcorn Time will continue delivering the same experience as always to users, but with this change its position as a client is reinforced, while central development will take place on Butter.
A Smart Move
A smart move, without a doubt. Butter will assume the role of public project, without copyrighted content and without revenue, which should make it virtually untouchable for the MPAA and its friends, while at the same time Popcorn Time and any other similar program in the near future receive the benefits of its code. For now there is nothing to show, as the official site on GitHub doesn't even have a compatible binary (you'll have to compile it yourself), but we'll be keeping a close eye on it...
