Creator of Popcorn Time goes public with his identity

Popcorn Time has become an international phenomenon by making pirating movies as easy as watching Netflix.

Until now, the identity of the person who created it has remained a mystery. But no longer. In an interview with a Norwegian news organization, 29-year-old Argentinian designer Federico Abad has revealed himself to be the man behind the software.

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The interview is behind a paywall, but TorrentFreak has read and summarized the interview here.

For those not familiar, Popcorn Time is now an open-source software project that has created a simple interface for finding and streaming torrents of videos. Previously, people had to be savvy enough to know how to search for these torrents, use a torrent downloader, and often mess with video codecs to get them to play (while hoping they didn’t just install a stack of malware).

Rather than waiting for the torrents to download, Popcorn Time lets people just click to start streaming any video. It’s big enough that Netflix has now cited it as a threat to its growth. And movie studios in the U.S. have become more aggressive in filing litigation against users of the service.

Abad said he started the project to simplify torrents and managed to attract a team of collaborators. But at some point, the group got nervous that studios were on to them, and shut the site down in March 2014.

However, the code was open-sourced. And since then, several other groups have used it to create versions of Popcorn Time that are still widely available.