It's official — Popcorn Time's torrent streaming service has permanently gone offline, but the Popcorn Time team is not done yet. After learning from the first site, the developers are planning to roll out a legal alternative called Project Butter.
Just a few days ago, the hubbub started because of an internal dispute in the Popcorn Time team. With a potential lawsuit looming, several of the core developers for the torrent-streaming site left the team.
When the person in charge of the domain name left, the .io domain ceased to work. At one point, the site was even brought back up, but only for a short period. In an attempt to push through with the original project, the Popcorn Time team intended to transfer the domain to a new owner. But Gandi.net, the domain's service provider, withdrew the changes.
"In the last few days someone has been tampering with our infrastructure, mainly our DNS service and we can't convince our provider https://gandi.net that we are us and want to stay online," the team said before the Popcorn Time website went offline due to DNS attacks.
Someone is tempering with our infrastructure and @gandi_net doesn't believe we are us
— Popcorn Time (@popcorntimetv) October 23, 2015
The team, however, is not yet finished and intends to make a comeback with Popcorn Time's legal counterpart: Project Butter.
"This new project, hosted on GitHub, is basically your beloved Popcorn Time stripped down of the parts that made people wary," the new Project Butter team writes.
hello world ! i'm butter, little brother of @pocorntimetv — Butter (@butterproject) October 23, 2015
According to the developers, when this new project goes live, it will "never stream any copyrighted material." Project Butter is essentially Popcorn Time minus the direct links to pirated TV shows and movies. Although Popcorn Time's younger brother will be somewhat restricted, it is hoped that the new project will still be able to deliver a great streaming service.
The team also added that most of the Popcorn Time-related websites such as its blog are also going down because of DNS attacks.
Popcorn Time's streaming service is gone for good, but it seems that Project Butter will be here to stay when it launches.
Photo: Mark Turnauckas | Flickr
