I am not sure about Popcorn Time, but these days you can find plenty of watchable results by searching for "<movie name> watch online" in search engines from countries that don't care about copyright (notably Russia).
It appears that they use the same setup - put terabytes of encrypted video files on platforms that offer some kind of free storage (hello, Github) and have a simple website hosted in a piracy-friendly country that loads these files, decrypts them on-the-fly and plays the video. If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch. But having relevant movies splintered over a multitude of competing platforms with a combined rent approaching what you could pay for a small apartment is a complete non-starter. So, people are back to piracy.
It appears that they use the same setup - put terabytes of encrypted video files on platforms that offer some kind of free storage (hello, Github) and have a simple website hosted in a piracy-friendly country that loads these files, decrypts them on-the-fly and plays the video. If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch. But having relevant movies splintered over a multitude of competing platforms with a combined rent approaching what you could pay for a small apartment is a complete non-starter. So, people are back to piracy.