Where the Fuck Can I Stream This?
No recs. No social. Just tell us. Someone.
It’s so simple. Well, it should be. Which may be a problem, honestly. Last night, I tweeted about my desire (which as it turns out is basically everyone’s desire, at least on Twitter) to have a simple way to figure out what is streaming, where.
This is not surprising, of course. We live in a world of 400 streaming services, with seemingly a dozen added every week. No single person can keep track of what bit of content is on which service, of course. But actually, the powers-that-be, meaning, the streaming boxes, are pretty poor at this, it turns out. Also surprisingly poor at this: Google. I mean, obviously you can find what you want with enough digging, but it’s a bit more archeological than I think we’d all prefer.
What I’m looking for is super simple. And I want to lay this out now since after my tweet about a half dozen companies/people reached out with solutions. I’ve checked out some of them previously and have found myself wanting. And for the newer startups, I want to lay down my thoughts before I check them out. Maybe someone nailed it, but I sort of doubt it. For a core reason I’ll get into in a second.
Anyway, here’s what I want. An app/website that has a search box. A big fucking search box. Like Google times three. 72 point font size at least. Honestly, all I want is a search box. You can have a logo, I suppose. You type in what you’re looking for. That could be the name of a show or movie. Or a general description. Maybe a star, director, or the like. And you hit return.
Then. Wait for it…
You get a result. A single result. Maybe a few if your description was vague and the service is not sure what you want. And it says this show or movie or documentary is playing on this service right now. Or starting on this date. Ideally it also shows leaving on this date. That’s it. That’s the service.
Honestly, I don’t even need it to deep link to where you can immediately start streaming. It would be nice, sure. But I’m a simple man with simple needs. I just need to know where I need to go. I can get there. Tell me where I need to go.
If we’re feeling luxurious, you could have a simple capture function to, say, create a list of everything I’m looking to actually watch. But I’m wary of even this because this is the path all of the services trying to capture this market immediately go after. And I think it leads to a trap.
The trap is obvious: this needs to be as simple as possible. No cruft. Again just a search box and a result. I don’t want recommendations. There are a seemingly infinite number of companies focused on this, including all the big players. I DON’T NEED ANY MORE RECS. ACTUALLY, I NEED FEWER RECS. Content is not the issue. Finding it is.
If I see any social stuff, I’m gonna scream.
This points to the other big problem beyond clutter and complexity: the model. Honestly, this probably isn’t an actual business? And I’m really not sure it’s a venture-backed business. I mean, sure, if you can own this market and capture the user base which is eventually everyone alive on planet Earth, then you can probably figure out how to monetize from there. It’s a big TAM. It might be the biggest TAM in terms of users. Does anyone not need this?
But don’t let me sweet talk you. This is very likely a crappy business. Because again, it needs to be simple. And it needs to do what it needs to do and not a thing more. Feature creep kills all these services. This is TV Guide for the 21st century (which, of course, is also working on this problem). And it likely can’t get acquired by anyone who would want to acquire it because of how fragmented this market this is and the fact that Switzerland would immediately get nuked here if acquired.
Though, if you’re just doing content destination surfacing and not trying to upsell or deep link… maybe? Again, everyone needs this service! It’s like granular Google for a market in which everyone is a consumer.
Obviously all of this is easier said than done. Why doesn’t Google just do this? They’ve tried a few times. Again, it’s all about complexity and over-killing this problem to the point of pointlessness. This should probably be someone’s side project. Or a Wikipedia-like community entity (turns out, the internet is actually full of knowledgable people in terms of how to get the content they truly care about, but they’re distributed). The fact that this does not exist, that we’re all searching and complaining about this, would seem to say a lot.
It’s like the “What time is the Super Bowl?” SEO hack on steroids. Someone could do that for every single show and movie and I think we’d be settled. Then again, it is more complex than that because the rights are complex and constantly being sold and then resold. So something that is on Peacock may be there for a few weeks then elsewhere the back to Peacock.
It’s insanity. And it’s also why you probably can’t just rely on the powers-that-be to do something like this. At the end of the day, is Netflix going to want you to know that The Office is going to Peacock? Of course not. But just as importantly, is Netflix going to want, say, Apple or Google or Amazon or Roku to know such info to easily tell customers that? Undoubtedly not!
By the way, the movie I was trying to find last night was the new documentary about Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner. Turns out, it’s actually not on any of the streaming services yet even though it will be coming to HBO Max soon and even though all of HBO Max’s theatrical content is famously streaming the same day it hits theaters. It took me like eight rabbit hole clicks to figure this out. It should have taken one. The result: “In theaters. Not streaming yet. On HBO Max in a few weeks.”
That’s it. That’s the product.
Published on July 17, 2021 📆Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️
Update 7/18/21: Nearly all the replies to this mention a handful of services that offer some functionality. I suppose I should have more explicitly spelled this out above. Again, I have used a lot of these over the years. To my mind, ReelGood is the best. JustWatch is close as it’s very similar. And then there are a lot more focused on personalize recommendations, of these, I like Likewise and a handful of others. And then, yes, I have both Apple TV and a Chromecast with Google TV. Experiences range on this — Google is better, as you might hope! — but still not perfect. There are fucking ads (“sponsored content”) everywhere, for one thing.
As for ReelGood and JustWatch specifically, they’re overkill in my book for what I’m looking for. Both shove a ton of content in your face from first load and focus a lot on personalization, as well as having you pick which streaming services you subscribe to. Again, this makes sense for all the reasons stated above, but makes them conceptually heavy. In a way, it reminds me of trying to use Notion for simple note-taking. It’s an awesome, powerful product. But overkill for that particular use case.
They’re also both quite heavy when it comes to television shows, as they try to keep track of the episodes you’ve actually seen. Again, I understand why they do this, but the streaming services themselves already keep track of such things, I don’t want or need another service that does this (I recognize that others might like this feature, of course). It’s just another thing you need to do to make this service work as it’s supposed to. That’s too heavy. As are their own proprietary scores for content. Again, we all get it. It’s just too much for what I want, personally.
But there’s one more problematic element. A handful of times they don’t seem to have the right data or complete data. For example, recently I was looking for a BBC show called ‘Us’, according to ReelGood, it’s unavailable. But that’s not true. It is available via the BBC’s iPlayer. Yes, that’s a UK service, and so this isn’t available in the US, but I don’t care about that. There are ways. Again, I just want to know where I can find it. I’ll take it from there.
