Hollywood's Nightmare: Watching Pirated Movies on Your HDTV Is as Easy as Buying a $35 Chromecast

Popcorn Time is an app that streams movies directly from torrents on to your computer, and it's seen its fair share of publicity, being lauded as a free Netflix alternative and chastised as an illegal file-sharing network.

After a brief legal scuffle influenced the original developers to abandon the app, a new set of devs took over the open-source Popcorn Time project, which is now available at popcorn-time.tv for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.

While the original devs claim that they were doing nothing wrong legally, Popcorn Time has been described as a "Netflix for pirates," and is essentially that, letting its users stream the latest Hollywood blockbusters online for free.

When you watch a movie in the BitTorrent-powered Popcorn Time, the torrent file is being stored in a secret location on your hard drive, which is then seeded to other users at the same time. Once you restart your computer, the file is gone.

To make matters worse on the movie industry, anyone with the right cord can connect their computer to their high-def television for big-screen viewing. While there have been no original plans to add Chromecast support (unlike Show Box), the new devs of Popcorn Time hinted at the possibility of it in the near future in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Turns out, casting movies from Popcorn Time on a computer to an HDTV is as easy as using the Google Chrome web browser, making Popcorn Time even more enticing for thrifty movie watchers at home.

How You Could Cast Popcorn Time Movies

All it takes right now to cast movies to Chromecast is the Popcorn Time program on a computer, along with the Google Cast extension for Chrome.

Image Credit googleusercontent.com

The only thing Popcorn Time users would have to do is play a movie in the program, then enter a simple URL—http://127.0.0.1:8888—into their Chrome browser. This will enable Popcorn Time streaming in the browser, which can then be easily casted using the Cast this tab feature of the extension.

And that's all there is to it. Streaming of free Hollywood blockbusters right on your big-screen TV. It's like taking Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes and combining them into a totally free product. It's not the most moral way to get movies, but man do they make it easy.

There is also another version of Popcorn Time being maintained by another set of developers over at time4popcorn.eu, but they only support Windows computers, though they are working on mobile apps currently.

Some have stated that Popcorn Time may do to the film industry what Napster did to music, but we'll have to wait and see. What do you think?

Popcorn image via Shutterstock