I used to love getting the new TV Guide in the mail. The listings in the grids in the newspaper just didn’t have enough information for me.
For a while, my dad subscribed to HBO. They’d send out a little movie guide for the month. It listed all the movies you’d be able to see in the next month, but better than that, they’d publish photos and descriptions of the movies.
I’m not sure how many hours I spent pouring through those publications, but now that print is so long dead, what’s replaced it? What’s changed?
These days we get our networks from the HD antenna. We don’t watch any live TV unless it’s a special event. A Tivo DVR does a great job of gathering up shows from the networks. But what about everything else? We used to rent video tapes and DVDs from the video store, but we don’t even need the vending machine rentals any more.
Practically everything is streaming or ‘on demand’ now. You really never have to wait for a scheduled time to start watching anything anymore. But how do you go about finding what you’re looking for? Are we supposed to browse for hours in each collection that we have access to?
If you have an AppleTV, they are trying to bring the content your apps together into one place so you can pick up where you left off, but the experience is incomplete. Not all services participate.
I also change up my subscriptions throughout the year, so I’d like to have a tool that lets me simply add or remove a service as I need to.
I’m glad that I didn’t have to create this on my own, but I’m always happy to share a good find. I found JustWatch.com last year and I can’t recommend it more. It’s the best tool I’ve seen for locating exactly where a movie or show is available right now.
https://www.justwatch.com/us/new
I believe, JustWatch.com is the best site on the internet and app on your phone or TV for when you need to search for a film or show and you’re not sure how to watch it.
Enter the name of the movie in the search box and they’ll show you how to stream it on your current services, or how to rent or buy it if it’s not available to stream.
The site lets you mark off which streaming services you use and will open the movie in that app for you… if you have it set up on the same device.
I created an account so I could save my current services and create a Watch List to come back to.
Now if they could also remind me to pause my subscriptions for me when I’m done with a series, that’d be pretty cool, too.