Popcorn Time is an app that has been in the news quite a lot recently. It allows users to freely access countless movies and TV shows completely for free, using a similar system like Netflix, only based on different technology in the backend. And while it’s been accepted as a fact for a while now that piracy is simply always going to be there, Popcorn Time has been a particularly problematic phenomenon due to the sheer ease with which uses can access copyrighted materials through it.
And it seems like some of the big companies on the market have started to take notice – for example, it’s recently been revealed that Netflix have been getting more and more nervous about the presence of Popcorn Time around them, as they have sent out a memo to their shareholders that the company is going to aim at its biggest competitor, namely Popcorn Time.
In the letter, the company describes how the rise of Popcorn Time in markets like the Netherlands, compared to legitimate services like Netflix and HBO, has been a worrying trend and something must be done about it if these companies want to stay in business.
What exactly they’re going to do to address the situation though, we don’t really know yet. Fighting piracy seems to work most effectively when a company focuses on trying to provide a better alternative through their paid services, instead of trying to take down the sources of piracy directly. Users are going to want free content and they’re going to seek it out one way or the other, but if they get a better alternative with more features on paid platforms, they might start changing their minds.
It’s a concept that certainly worked for Valve with Steam, as the company managed to turn around the situation with piracy in the PC gaming industry, and gave gamers huge reasons to pay for their entertainment. Valve even managed to tackle markets like Russia, which have long been notorious for their issues with piracy and the unwillingness of their users to pay anything for video games.
Right now, Valve have the biggest share of the PC gaming market, and they have been branching out in other industries – and it all started out by offering simple, yet important services like community features, achievements and stats tracking, which could only be accessed from legitimate paying accounts. Perhaps Netflix could also look into integrating social functionality into their platform more actively, or at least explore other possible ways in which their service could branch out. It certainly has the potential to give its users an interesting experience in other ways than watching movies, but the company has to carefully explore those options first.
Valve managed to corner the market by forcing counterstrike 1.3 players to use steam. It had nothing to do about offering a better alternative at the time, the platform was garbage at the time but it was the only way to continue playing CS. They owe everything they have to CS.