Last week, a movie-watching service called Popcorn Time hit the internet — it promised a Netflix-like experience for any movie you might want to watch, but used the expansive network of pirated BitTorrent movies to deliver content to users. It earned praise for its intuitive user interface, but its creators shut Popcorn Time down on Saturday, saying that the ongoing legal concerns were too much of a strain to deal with.
However, Popcorn Time was always meant to be open source, and as such someone else has now picked up the mantle and brought the service back to life. As reported by TorrentFreak, the BitTorrent site YTS has decided to take over the Popcorn Time project and resurrect it — beta builds for Windows, OS X, and Linux are being posted to GitHub here.
"The YTS team will now be picking up the Popcorn Time project and continuing on like previously," a developer told TorrentFreak. "We are in a better position copyright wise as for us, because it's build on our API. It's as if we have built another interface to our website." Whether or not this new version of Popcorn Time will last longer than the original remains to be seen, but the team sounds confident it can keep things running. "It's our vision at YTS that we see through projects like these and that just because they create a little stir in the public, it doesn't mean they are shut down," a YTS dev said.
Update: This article has been updated to include GitHub download sources for Popcorn Time and remove a site that appears to not be related to the YTS project.