When was the last time you went to the movies? Can’t you remember? That has an explanation. Each passing day, watching a film or your favorite TV series is easier to do on your laptop, desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone than on the movie theater or even in front of a TV. The mobility (or portability) factor comes into play, as does the ability to choose what you want to see, where you want to see it, and for how much time.
That is why streaming platforms have become so popular. They let users choose their preferred entertainment options, and they have options for every taste: drama, comedy, science-fiction, horror, thrillers, love stories, and even the most educative documentaries.
Two of the most famous and widely used streaming platforms on the planet are Popcorn Time and Netflix. The former is torrent-based, the latter is a multimedia library with content organized by location. Both of them are easy to access, complete, and spread around the world, and both of them are better if you use a VPN. We will tell you everything you need to know in this article.
How to use a VPN for Popcorn Time and Netflix
- Choose a secure VPN with robust encryption and lots of countries available for connection
- Go to that VPN’s website
- Register for the VPN service
- Create a username and a password
- Download and install the VPN app on your device
- Launch the VPN app
- Log in to your VPN account
- Choose the country you want to unblock content from and connect to one of its servers
- Enter Popcorn Time or Netflix and enjoy
Why TorGuard is the best VPN for Popcorn Time and Netflix
| Pick a VPN! | VPN | Price for 1 month sub | Site Rating | Buy Now |
| Best VPN |  | $5 a month (code "best10VPN") | 9.9 |  |
| Good VPN |  | $9 a month | 8.9 | |
| Decent VPN |  | $6.95 a month | 8.8 | |
Not every VPN brand works with Netflix since the platform has been hunting down proxy connections and blocking them altogether. However, TorGuard is still standing as one of the few companies that work with the world’s leading multimedia library in 2019. The secret lies in their unique dedicated/streaming IPs that prevent you from being blocked.
With more than 3,000 servers, users can switch without limits in their quest for the best speeds and stable performance. The servers are spread in 55 nations, which means available content in that many countries.
TorGuard is extremely fast and secure, appealing traits for Popcorn Time users. It has a no-logging policy, DNS leak protection, military-grade AES 256-bit encryption, a kill switch, and a myriad of protocols available, all for $10 per month.
In conclusion, Popcorn Time and Netflix are two of the best-known streaming services on the planet. However, for accessibility purposes, a VPN works handsomely with both of them, not to mention the security boost it can provide.
Popcorn Time: a torrent-based streaming paradise
Popcorn Time is a torrent-based streaming platform. It comes with an integrated media player, but in reality, what it does is searching for content in torrenting clients around the web and reproducing it on its own site.
The service is a BitTorrent client in which users can enjoy movies, TV series, talent and talk shows, short and animated features, and documentaries, all in one site. It is very similar to Stremio and Powder Player, as the three can reproduce torrent files found on the web.
Popcorn Time is compatible with multiple platforms, such as Linux, OS X, Windows, and Android, and uses sequential downloading of files listed by several sources, specifically torrent websites.
As one of the world’s most famous torrenting clients, Popcorn Time has had more than a few legal inconveniences. For example, at its most successful period, in 2014, the site was temporarily taken down after being pressured by the MPAA. However, since that moment, the software has been repeatedly forked, and other domains like popcorntime.io and popcorntime.sh have appeared.
It is fair to say that Popcorn Time has achieved worldwide fame. It can be used and configured in precisely 44 languages. It is written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
Netflix: the industry’s leader
You can find dozens of streaming platforms that have international penetration and hundreds or even thousands of movies and series available. However, none of them can compare with the worldwide phenomenon that Netflix represents.
It is a multimedia streaming platform in the form of an online content library, with tons of content classified and sorted by geographical location. It is an American service but is available in more than 200 countries around the world.
Each country in which you can find and use Netflix has its own version of the service’s catalog of options. That means that movies that are present in the American region may not be available in Uruguay, for example.
The US catalog is the richest and most diverse, along with the Japanese. Those two are the most desirable, but if you enter Netflix from a specific country, you will have the movies and series from that nation, not the one you want, at least without the help of a Virtual Private Network (more on that later.)
Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, United States. It started as a place for renting movies and other shows, but it changed its modus operandi in 2007. In that year, and thanks to the boom of the Internet, Netflix became an online streaming center. Right now, Netflix also produces some of its content, with resounding success. The service is subscription-based.
Popcorn Time vs. Netflix: similarities
Both platforms represent excellent alternatives for streamers that want to entertain themselves and their families with Internet-based content. While Popcorn Time has the price advantage (it is, after all, a free service,), Netflix is lighter, smoother, and has more native options. You can find a boatload of movies and series in the torrent-based Popcorn Time, too.
Their interfaces are similar in the sense that they both present thumbnails and movie titles in a comparable way. Streamers can find what they are looking for by sorting the content by categories, title, or genre. In the case of Popcorn Time, when people click on the name of the file they want to watch, it is then downloaded through the BitTorrent protocol.
Achieving protection and defeating geo-blocks with VPN
If you are using either Popcorn Time or Netflix, you will benefit from adding a VPN to the experience. VPN means Virtual Private Networks, which are online encryption resources that can hide the user’s IP address and shared content with a two-fold intention: enhancing privacy and unblocking geo-restricted content on the web.
VPN apps can encrypt the user’s information so no prying eyes can understand and use it; rerouting it to remote servers away from Internet Service Providers, platforms implementing geo-blocking, hackers, censorship, surveillance, and other potentially dangerous or compromising agents/situations.
In the particular case of Popcorn Time, being a torrent-based client, it comes with significant security risks. You can get in touch with hackers, malware, infected attachments, and even law enforcement agencies. To avoid all that drama, use a VPN and your online identity, which is your IP address, will be hidden while you borrow another IP from your VPN brand.
Netflix, on the other hand, has other issues: accessibility. While the service has a different catalog for every nation, you can’t access another region if you are in a specific country. For example, access to the American Netflix is unavailable for Japanese users.
However, with the right VPN provider, you will be able to overcome those issues. Log in to your VPN brand, choose a country, and you will earn an IP number from that nation, effectively unblocking its Netflix catalog.
