If you’ve been in front of a computer over the past couple of weeks, you’ve likely caught wind of the Popcorn Time drama, a “Netflix for pirated content” that threatens to shake the very foundations of Hollywood entertainment.
It’s been a huge story. And once we get beyond the hype, the usage of the product could become equally huge. And that could turn out to make things very interesting for a startup with Portland ties, trakt.
Why? Well, they were unknowingly baked into the open source incarnation of Popcorn Time:
We built a product to be the best in the world at keeping track of movies and TV that people watch, automatically so you don’t need to manually check in from your phone. We call this scrobbling, a term borrowed from Last.fm. We are supported by a variety of media centers, and see over one million scrobbles per month.
Through our API, we allow developers to pull the images and metadata that we use on our site. As it turns out, we are becoming the go-to for such data. We gather it from a variety of sources, such as Fanart.tv, thetvdb, IMDB, etc. Maybe we have done the best job of making it all available in one place?
Now, they’re getting happily hammered by requests as people use the product—and fork the project.
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
For more, see trakt’s post on the discovery. For more on the company, visit trakt.tv.
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Awesome! Great news 🙂
Thank you for sharing my post, Rick! I am happy to report that tonight we received confirmation from Popcorn Time that trakt.tv scrobbling will be added in a release next month! I have updated the post for future readers.