The "Netflix for pirates" has become increasingly popular

Sep 2, 2014 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Here’s a piece of information that will make the blood boil across Hollywood studios: Popcorn Time has been installed over 1.4 million times in the United States alone.

TorrentFreak reports that most users of the growingly popular app come from the United States where Popcorn Time has been installed on more than 1.4 million devices. However, there are only about 100,000 active users in the country, but the number of new installs is around 15,000 per day.

The so-called “Netflix for pirates” has been an instant hit since it offers users BitTorrent-powered streaming in a really easy-to-use interface that’s styled similarly to the famous Netflix.

The Popcorn Time app was made available earlier this year and has only grown in popularity since then, despite the movie industry’s best efforts to make it go away. When the original developers decided to back off, the source code was made public and others picked it up to continue the work.

Time4Popcorn is one of the most popular forks of the original app. “At the beginning of August there were between 17-18K installations a day on all operating systems and last weekend there were somewhere between 13-15K a day,” said the Popcorn Time team.

Android Planet reports that there is also quite a large userbase in the Netherlands. The 1.3 million installs put the country in second place after the United States. Here, however, it should be pointed out that there are less than 17 million people living in the country, which means that close to 8 percent of the country uses the app.

Brazil follows next, but there have only been 700,000 installed apps so far, and some 56,000 active users, while the United Kingdom comes next with half a million devices sporting the app. Australia, another country that has been exasperating the Hollywood studios due to the high piracy levels, comes up on number five with only 93,000 installs.

While the stats only apply for the time4popcorn.eu app, others are surely adding to the numbers, although they’re probably popular in pretty much the same nations.

Either way, the coming months should be interesting, and the popularity of these apps may grow even more as new features are on the way, as well as support for more operating systems, especially for the time4popcorn.eu app. Chromecast support is already available in the Alpha version, and VPN has been integrated to help users stay under the radar.