Popcorn Share
A social platform for movie lovers — find people with the same taste, form watch groups, chat and video-call in real time, then book real tickets together.
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“Streaming made movie-watching solo. Deciding what to watch, watching together, and talking about it after has no good home. Popcorn Share is that home.”
Client
A solo-built consumer social platform for movie lovers — designed, built, deployed and operated end to end from one seat.
Challenge
The social layer around film — the group chat about what to see, the plan to go, the conversation after — is scattered across WhatsApp, Instagram and nowhere. Ticketing apps lead with the transaction, not the people. Nobody had built a home for the community part.
Solution
A community-first MERN + WebRTC + Socket.io platform. Users find people who like the same films, form watch groups ("Rooms") around a specific showtime, chat with typing and read receipts, jump into a voice or video call, post in a movie-centric feed, and deep-link into BookMyShow when the group is ready. Rooms auto-complete after the showtime and prompt every member for a review. React 19 + Vite client, Express 5 / MongoDB API, Socket.io for real-time, simple-peer WebRTC for call media, all on a single AWS EC2 box (nginx + Mongo + pm2). 15 route modules, 15 Mongoose models.
Result
Live at popcornshare.in, in production, running the whole stack from one box under real users. Almost every hard bug lived in the platform seams (iOS gesture-gated cameras, per-connection Socket.io membership dropping on mobile network blips, Helmet COOP blocking Google OAuth popups, Vite version drift between local and prod) — each root-caused and fixed in production.
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Sivden Architects