Unlike in music, where services like Spotify offer a single subscription for almost any track the user might want, there's no one-stop shop for video. That’s partly because of the way licensing works: Movies are released at different times for theaters, video-on-demand, and then cable-TV or streaming services. It’s partly also because, unlike in music, video-streaming services have chosen to compete with each other by offering their own exclusive content rather than trying to have the most complete menu. As a result, the best products remain spread out across a confusing phalanx of outlets.

Web Search Interest in the Netherlands—Last 12 Months

(Data: Google Trends, normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100)

Popcorn Time, according to people who use it, lets you access just about everything on the Internet. It operates using the BitTorrent protocol, a file-sharing method that breaks large files into small pieces, which are shared out across the network of its users’ computers. When a user wants to download a file, her computer assembles it from pieces stored on other people’s computers across the network. This makes it easier to download large files, and harder to pinpoint who's responsible for uploading them—and thus almost impossible to eliminate. (The main difference between Popcorn Time and traditional BitTorrent is that when you choose a file to watch, BitTorrent assembles it first and stores it on your computer’s hard drive; PopcornTime just streams it as its components come in.)

The site emerged seemingly out of nowhere last year. The people claiming to be its creators wrote that it began as a challenge by “a group of geeks from Buenos Aires who wanted to see if they could create a better way to watch movies.” By March last year they had abandoned it because, they said, they “need[ed] to move on with our lives."

Others quickly took up the baton. There are multiple Popcorn Time sites now; popcorntime.io is the biggest, it has the most likes on Facebook (it passed 100,000 recently) and it appears at the top of Google searches. It has a desktop client for both Mac and Windows computers, plus a Linux version and an Android app.

So who is behind this slick operation? Last month, I spoke to a person who claims to be Popcorn Time’s official spokesperson, a 20-something from Ontario called Robert “Red” English. He says that there are about 20 people—programmers and designers—scattered across the planet, working on Popcorn Time in their free time. It's an open-source project, so anyone can submit changes to the code, add features, and fix bugs. If he and the rest of the team think a contributor is helping, they will ask him or her to join on a more formal basis. Contributors change frequently.

Popcorn Time has no funding—it’s run out of the pockets of the small community behind it—and no business model, English says. Unlike other platforms used for piracy, it doesn’t even carry advertising. "We are a community and we are not really driven by the money of it," he says. "I don’t think it will be ever turned into a proper business." In other words, there are no plans to emulate Napster or BitTorrent and seek legitimacy. Napster, the first file-sharing site to gain prominence, had a string of legitimate business owners after being shut down, including German Media conglomerate Bertelsmann and U.S. retailer Best Buy, and is now part of streaming music provider Rhapsody. BitTorrent (the company, not the protocol) is backed by venture capital funds including Accel Partners.