Can you submit any evidence that a TV is anything more than a bigger computer screen?
My TV has HDMI inputs; if I wanted to move my computer, I could hook my computer up to the TV. Apple has an accessory where the primary selling point (for me) is that it can bounce output from a computer to a TV. There's an entire family of computers where the entire point of them is to be hooked up to TVs and used as media centers.
Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.
> Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.
This was my entire point. People didn't just listen to their Napster-downloaded music on their computer, they listened to them in the car, they brought burnt discs to friends house, etc.
Timing is important. The things you mentioned like Apple TV and HDMI-out are not yet refined. It's not easy, and most importantly, it's not ubiquitous. By the time Napster came out every tower computer came with a CDRW drive.
People don't watch movies in the car, so that part doesn't matter. If you're trying to compare the ease of burning to portable media, tossing an mpeg on a thumb drive is easier and basically as cheap as buying CDs were back in the day. If your only point is that the movie is playing on the screen in the office and not the screen in the living room, I think you're vastly overestimating how much people care but it's not the sort of point I think I can find data to back up, so I'm willing to agree to disagree.
We do have data that says PC sales have been declining for the past several years and are being replaced by tablets. I'd wager that if movies are not being watched on television as much then they're being watched on iPads and other tablets, not laptops. Popcorn Time doesn't run on tablets.
That's actually a good point; tablets have absolutely no utility for me and so I constantly forget that they exist, but lots of people aren't me and apparently think they're pretty great.
If it enables them to watch content, period, people will find a way.
The argument is honestly irrelevant. Popcorn time is a UX leap from what was previously possible. There may be another UX leap in the physical device on which the content is played, but you can't ignore the moon landing just because it didn't happen on Mars.
It's a UX leap, certainly, but Napster was not just a UX leap, it was used by lots of regular people. Is PCT? Even within the subset of users that are torrenting movies, what percentage are doing that through PCT vs. downloading them for later?
My TV has HDMI inputs; if I wanted to move my computer, I could hook my computer up to the TV. Apple has an accessory where the primary selling point (for me) is that it can bounce output from a computer to a TV. There's an entire family of computers where the entire point of them is to be hooked up to TVs and used as media centers.
Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.