I'm curious what your view of what academic publishing being "popcornTimed" would look like.
PopcornTime isn't really the mechanism for curation, it's merely one avenue to show the result of a highly complicated curation process that's always occurring. The curation of movies involves big-budget advertising, box-office results (which feed news reports which feed box office results), websites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and of course some level of purely "viral" spreading of what's good and bad (social recommendation). PopcornTime/BitTorrent itself is just easier distribution that sits on top of and feed off that curation process.
So if you can only make money off the distribution, I agree you're going to have trouble. But if you can shift your business model to be based on the business of curation I think you're fairly safe. You mention the price of curation decreases year on year, but in the case of something as highly specialized and expertise-based as academic research I'm not totally sure the analogy with pop-culture movies holds. "The crowd" can relatively easily curate movies (which says nothing about its ability to select high vs low quality actually), but I'm not convinced "the crowd" can effectively curate academic research without large changes to the overall system (see publons.com for a way that might change if peer reviews are rewarded and open).
PopcornTime isn't really the mechanism for curation, it's merely one avenue to show the result of a highly complicated curation process that's always occurring. The curation of movies involves big-budget advertising, box-office results (which feed news reports which feed box office results), websites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and of course some level of purely "viral" spreading of what's good and bad (social recommendation). PopcornTime/BitTorrent itself is just easier distribution that sits on top of and feed off that curation process.
So if you can only make money off the distribution, I agree you're going to have trouble. But if you can shift your business model to be based on the business of curation I think you're fairly safe. You mention the price of curation decreases year on year, but in the case of something as highly specialized and expertise-based as academic research I'm not totally sure the analogy with pop-culture movies holds. "The crowd" can relatively easily curate movies (which says nothing about its ability to select high vs low quality actually), but I'm not convinced "the crowd" can effectively curate academic research without large changes to the overall system (see publons.com for a way that might change if peer reviews are rewarded and open).