Popcorn Time, the controversial multi-platform open source application that features an integrated media player, quietly marked its first year last month and the people behind the program says that it continues to remain strong and thus will be around for the long haul.

The app is a free alternative to subscription-based video streaming services such as Netflix, which makes the original Popcorn Time a no-no from the business standpoint.

Popcorn Time uses sequential downloading to play copies of movies. Because of its ease of use following its February 2014 launching, Popcorn Time became very popular and has since received positive media attention.

With its surging popularity however, it also faced mounting pressure from the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) because production companies will surely lose money if Popcorn Time continues streaming videos and movies for free. Thus the original developers took it down on March 14, 2014.

Forked to other developers

In order to play within the legal bounds of video streaming, Popcorn Time has been ‘forked’ by its original developers to several other development teams to maintain the program and come up with new features.

The forking of Popcorn Time is the term used in splitting the main software package into various other apps while maintaining the application’s source code. Since the original Popcorn Time is a free and open-source software, its original development team has all the right to forked it without permission and also without violating any copyright or infringement law.

Thus Popcorn Time has resulted to several apps for Android, Windows, iOS, Mac as well as Linux and just like the original software, the resulting apps were still free for downloading by users.

Who is behind Popcorn Time

To mark its first year in operation, the people behind the original app came up with a Popcorn Time blog to answer all the queries about the project and the people who made the software such a big hit among internet users.

The blog explained that Popcorn Time is a community of people with no particular name or business, consistent with its tagline that it is made with love by a bunch of geeks from around the world.

The site said that everyone is part of Popcorn Time including the people who think the project is amazing, the people who help spread the word about the app and make it better as a whole, the people who post regularly on the app’s forum site to report of bugs and issues, as well as the people who contributes to the changes in the software’s source code every now and then to make the app lovelier each day.

The team behind Popcorn Time reiterated that they are not sponsored by anyone and that neither do they have a paid team of people behind the project. It once again said that it is not a business and does not have any affiliation. Popcorn Time is just a community of people who spends time on the app to make it amazing for everyone else, the blog cited.