14 DAY TRIAL // The man behind Popcorn Time, the popular and free BitTorrent-based video streaming platform, has decided to reveal his true identity in an interview with Norwegian website DN.no.
After being previously known by the moniker Sebastian, the driving and creative force behind Popcorn Time's success is Federico Abad, a 29-year-old Argentinian designer.
The Popcorn Time story
In his extensive interview, Abad revealed how the Popcorn Time saga began and how, at first, he was extremely frustrated with the sorry state of the movie industry in his home country of Argentina.
Because movies were being officially released 6 to 12 months later than the US, and sometimes even 5 or 10 years after, Abad wanted to simplify the process of downloading the latest movie releases from BitTorrent trackers, without having to get educated into the fine art of P2P and all of its related technologies.
For this, he and a couple of friends, created the first version of Popcorn Time with the sole purpose of being simple enough so even his grandmother can use, with no more than two clicks required to start a movie, and with no need to mess around with .torrent files.
As he recounts, the app's popularity was a success to everyone involved, soon taking over the lives of all developers, and at one point, the team reaching a massive headcount of 100 programmers.
Criminal groups wanted to distribute malware
The unexpected success and rise to fame was also noticed on the Dark Web, Abad being contacted numerous times by underground criminal groups, all wanting to distribute malware via his platform, or even willing to buy the user database with all their personal details included.
As Abad recalls, some groups offered up to $10,000 / €9,000 per week to distribute malware, some were willing to pay up to $5 / €4.5 for each user infected by spyware, and if he would have given into all requests, he would have made $100 million / €90 million in the app's short lifespan.
Warner Bros. is responsible for closing down the original Popcorn Time app
But as the service grew bigger with each passing month, as its owners were fearing, it also slowly started getting the attention of top US movie studios.
Despite the fact that all Popcorn Time developers used anonymizing software to hide their real location, by early 2014, according to Abad's interview, a lawyer representing Warner Bros. started adding all Popcorn Time developers as friends on LinkedIn, in one of the most gangster-style intimidation moves you'll ever read about.
The message was understood loud and clear, and by March 2014, the developer team decided to shut down the service and open source the application's code on GitHub.
While the original Popcorn Time team has gone on to other more legal projects, its spirit lives through the app's source code, which is now used to power tens of clones around the Web.