What's going on behind the scenes, however, is a lot more complex, not to mention illegal in much of the world. To get all of those movies, Popcorn Time reaches out to groups of people sharing films and TV shows over torrent networks. It then begins to download the video you want to stream and at the same time shares that video with other people. This means when you click play, you're both downloading pirated content and sharing it with others.

Popcorn Time is significant because it's easy to use and it looks like the real deal

Torrents have been around for a long time and have historically been associated with piracy. They've never been particularly easy to get started with, though, so they never made it as big as, say, Napster. Popcorn Time, on the other hand, is a lot more straightforward. It hides everything that's difficult about torrents behind a stylish, easy-to-use interface. This isn't just helpful in a practical sense; it also gives the app a feeling of legitimacy, encouraging users who might otherwise be put off by torrenting sites. These reasons are why it's been gaining so much attention and why copyright holders are so unhappy about it.

There's a good chance you've heard of the app over the past year and a half, but its actual history is a little murky. That's made worse by the fact that there are multiple versions of the software developed by multiple teams of developers — at this point, there's no one true Popcorn Time. (Something that's also made the app much more difficult to shut down. You can kill one version, but another will soon replace it.) To clear it all up, we've put together a timeline of Popcorn Time's development highlights, as well as significant responses from rights groups.