Since its original release months ago, Popcorn Time has been described as the biggest threat to the entertainment industry status quo since Napster -- and for good reason. The software basically packages copyright-infringing torrent downloading into an easy-to-use Netflix experience.

And now that it's gone mobile and added Chromecast support -- bringing point-and-click torrenting to the biggest screen in the house -- it's about to become an even bigger threat to the movie industry.

Originally made for PC by a couple of Argentine programmers, Popcorn Time is open source software that has since forked into two separate development paths after the original programmers got cold feet from the legal heat headed their way. The app made by Time4Popcorn.eu is available on Mac, Windows and Linux, as well as the Android beta we tested.

No doubt about it, on any platform, Popcorn Time looks a lot like Netflix, with browsing for TV shows and Movies, a most popular group, several genre categories, and search (the last feature didn't work on two Android devices we tested, but it's in beta).

Using it is similar to a streaming platform too. Just click on a title, choose the quality you want, subtitles if available, and the movie starts to load.

When the movie starts, click the familiar Chromecast button in the corner and up it goes on to the big screen. This particular brand of Popcorn Time is continually adding lot of features -- Chromecast on Android is just the start. Other early versions of the PC Popcorn Time includes a virtual private network (VPN) built in, to shield users' IP addresses from prying eyes, and Airplay support is purportedly coming soon, too.

It's impressive what the Time4Popcorn.eu team has already done with the bare bones open source Popcorn Time software, which is still available to all interested coders on GitHub -- at least until the MPAA manages to deploy a DMCA takedown on it, as it recently has for the further-developed Popcorn-Official and Time4Popcorn GitHub pages.

(Photo : Screenshot: Popcorn Time)

And that brings us to the legality issue for Popcorn Time. Impressive though the app is, the software's legality is questionable at best -- one of the reasons why you won't find the Android app on the Google Play Store, requiring users to download the .apk directly from the Time4Popcorn.eu site at their own risk -- and its legal uses are, let's say, limited.

To test the Android Popcorn Time, we decided to load a legal public domain movie. In fact, we decided on perhaps the best public domain movie ever made: George A. Romero's classic "Night of the Living Dead."

Due to the producers forgetting to register Romero's low-budget classic, digital copies of the mother of all zombie movies are available on YouTube, InternetArchive.org and several other places for free -- just as it has always been free and legal to play any copy of the film on late night horror movie broadcasts. Arguably, the underground copyright-free spread of "Night of the Living Dead" is one of the reasons why zombies are a pop culture phenomenon now and not just a one-off late-60s black and white oddity.

But ironically, since "Living Dead" is free and easy to obtain (and not as popular and unavailable as, say, "Captain America: Winter Soldier"), it took forever to download the movie. Simply put, too few people felt the necessity to share it on bittorrent, and so download speeds were very, very slow.

(Photo : Screenshot: Popcorn Time)

Any other copyright free titles, if you can even find them, are likely to perform just as poorly.

And that brings us to the obvious point about Popcorn Time: it's obviously not designed for any legitimate use. If the lack of copyright-free titles in the catalogue isn't enough evidence, the built-in VPN feature coming soon seals it. There are so many other legal ways to get fast, easy, cheap, and full-featured streaming of great titles, and, unlike with Napster in the late-90s, there's no excuse for pirates about how there's no other digital distribution channels for the content they want. It's 2014, and there are.

However, the existence of Popcorn Time is likely to have one positive effect, which is to put a little extra pressure on content distributors to play nicer with legitimate streaming outlets -- be it Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, what-have-you -- lest their business models go the way the music industry's did a decade ago. And that might eventually mean more options, earlier and cheaper, for streamers that pay for their entertainment.

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