14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, PopcornTime.io announced it would be shutting down, mainly due to irreconcilable differences that emerged from internal disputes.
While many people never used it because they had the privilege of being born between "particular" mountains and oceans where legal alternatives like Netflix and Hulu are easily accessible, the rest of the planet relied on illegal software like Popcorn Time to be able to live-stream the latest movies on their desktop, phones and TVs.
If PopcornTime.io's quick departure has left a void in your life, here are three solid alternatives that provide the same type of functionality, more or less similar to the original Popcorn Time or the PopcornTime.io clone.
Popcorn-Time.se - another Popcorn Time clone, written in C++
Possibly the most adequate replacement is Popcorn-Time.se, another clone of the original Popcorn Time project developed by Federico Abad, the Argentinian designer.
The difference between the PopcornTime.io clone and the Popcorn-Time.se projects is the app's underlying codebase. While the original Popcorn Time and PopcornTime.io clone relied on JavaScript (Node.js desktop app), Popcorn-Time.se is written in C++, as most of today's desktop apps are.
Butter - the legal Popcorn Time
Another interesting project we've come across is Butter, which claims to be the legal version of Popcorn Time, ditching illegal pirate sites as the source of its movie files, and opting to use only legal and authorized streams.
The project has no public binaries available and seems to be currently under development. Keep an eye on it. Who knows, maybe something good will come out of it.
CouchPotato - not exactly your Popcorn Time clone
This project is not a Popcorn Time clone at all. CouchPotato is basically an automated torrent downloader where users can just add the names of the movies they want to watch, while CouchPotato searches through its sources, and then downloads them on your PC.
You can't stream movies, as in Popcorn Time, but you won't have to go digging through torrent sites either.
