Who needs Netflix?

If you read our re­port on the long-awaited ar­rival of Net­flix in this coun­try, on pages 36 and 37 (if not, go back and do so; I'll wait for you here), you may well be ex­cited at fi­nally get­ting to share in the tele­vi­sual good­ies that many other de­vel­oped coun­tries have al­ready en­joyed for some time now. Most peo­ple seem to agree that we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a golden age of TV se­ries, with more qual­ity pro­grammes than the time to con­sume them in. In that sense, Net­flix couldn't have ar­rived at a bet­ter mo­ment.

How­ever, while the on­line video provider will no doubt be a rag­ing suc­cess here, as it has in other coun­tries, and may even help to mit­i­gate Spain's en­demic piracy prob­lems, it is never a bad thing to keep your op­tions open. A cou­ple of weeks ago, I was asked to trans­late an ar­ti­cle for an­other pub­li­ca­tion that gave de­tails about an app that could make Net­flix -at least for a time- un­nec­es­sary. What's more, if you live in an area that has lim­ited in­ter­net cover, as I do, you may not even be able to see Net­flix at all, due to a lack of enough band­width. What­ever the case, the al­ter­na­tive I refer to is an app called Pop­corn Time.

Now, bear in mind I still haven't tried Pop­corn Time, so this is not a rec­om­men­da­tion; I'm just pass­ing on some in­for­ma­tion that could be use­ful to some peo­ple. From what I un­der­stand, Pop­corn Time is an app avail­able for An­droid, iOS, Linux and Win­dows that al­lows you to watch new films and se­ries com­pletely for free. There does ap­pear to be a few lim­i­ta­tions, such as the fact that the films and se­ries it has in its cat­a­logue are all in orig­i­nal ver­sion, al­beit with the op­tion of sub­ti­tles in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. If the orig­i­nal lan­guage is Eng­lish, which is prob­a­bly the case most of the time, then all the bet­ter for us. Apart from which, which of us do not need to brush up our French or Swahili?

From what I un­der­stand, after down­load­ing and in­stalling the app, you can se­lect the prod­uct you want to watch from a list or make a man­ual search. The ser­vice then al­lows you to watch your cho­sen con­tent in HD (720p) or FullHD (1080p) for­mats. The sys­tem be­hind Pop­corn Time is peer-to-peer tech­nol­ogy, which means you ac­cess the pro­grammes from the hard drive of an­other app user. After you join, peo­ple will then also be able to draw on whichever of the pro­grammes from Pop­corn Time you have on your hard drive.

As I said, I still haven't tried the app out, and for all I know it could be a waste of time. That's where you come in; if you have any­thing to say, why not write in and let us know.