Show HN: JustWatch – Choose your favorite streaming providers and see what’s new | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: JustWatch – Choose your favorite streaming providers and see what’s new

justwatch.com

94 pointsendymi0n66 comments

The site looks beautiful and the load time is terrific. You probably shouldn't have invoked Popcorn Time in comparison though because the value prop is totally different. This isn't streaming - it's aggregating. This isn't free - it's very expensive. I think you lose the comparison pretty handedly.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I do think this site offers a lot of value as an aggregator. I just think inviting the comparison to Popcorn Time is a mistake because, to the limited extent that they are comparable, Popcorn Time is better.

The remarkable thing about Popcorn Time was how easy it made watching anything you wanted to. To me, the fact that it could only do that by pirating was a downside. I don't want to pirate, I want to pay, but there's nothing on the market that has the range.

This solves a major current usability issue with the legal streaming market - that different providers have different things on offer and you have to go and search around to find whether you want to be on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

What it doesn't solve is the major issue with the streaming market - watching TV shows as they are broadcast rather than 6 months later as a box set.

> To me, the fact that it could only do that by sharing was a downside… I don't want to freeride, I want to pay.

FTFY

I agree with all of that. I think this site has a lot of value as an aggregator. It doesn't solve the Popcorn Time problem though because it doesn't make legally streaming movies easy. It just makes them easier to find them. That's not the same. It feels too much like they're trying to ride the wave of Popcorn time's success despite having very little in common.

My main point in writing the critique is just that if you invite a comparison between your product and another you should make sure that they're actually comparable and that yours will come out on top. Otherwise you'll turn what could have been a warm reception into a cold one.

For me Popcorn Time's biggest value proposition is not free content, but ability the selection and ability to watch with one click. Most media companies, with all the resources at their hands still haven't nail the experience. To find the movie I want I really need to browse multiple catalogues (itunes, amazon, netflix) - neither of them always have what I want. Then you have to login, updates cards and all this hassle.

So although right now their sites just aggregates, in the future it could allow you to prepay/buy credits which would be used to pay off the content owner/distributor (i.e amazon) each time you click Play.

Point being - to me it make complete sense to compare it PT

Wasn't that one of the original aims of GoogleTV? There were loads of shows legally available for streaming on network sites and on subscription services (in addition to live broadcast or cable) so you could search for a show or a movie and it would list all the places you could watch it at that time. Alternately you could browse by other criteria.

If I remember correctly, network sites and services like Hulu blocked GoogleTV via user agent strings and other methods because they wanted their streaming content to only be used as a secondary method of watching while at your computer, not on your living room TV and placed on and even footing with cable or (heaven forbid) independent/user-generated content.

Seems that happened pretty early on in GTV's product history and essentially put a damper on the sort of adoption that would have warranted further improvement of the service.

I would love something like this where you try to drive traffic to legitimate sources where the content is paid, but when it isn't, you get torrents.

i.e. the torrents are only there to meet demand when the industry is too stubborn to do so.

This would never happen because you'd get sued into oblivion, but one can dream.

Piracy is the reason you can't stream a movie the day it comes out. Movie theaters are the best DRM available.

For the nth time, 'the industry' is not monolithic. There isn't some collective bargaining agreement tying up the rights of all the films you want to watch but which are held hostage by mustachio-twirling villains. Every film offered for commercial sale is a separate financial asset of a company, typically the sole asset of the company that owns it, which then licenses it to a distributor within individual countries. Publication and distribution are largely separate economic entities, due to a combination of legal history (studios forbidden to own exhibition chains in the US), regional market knowledge, and language barriers (no studio has the capability to produce subtitles/dub tracks in every potential market). All the legal paperwork for a small independent film is very substantial, and would fill most of a typical bookshelf. I shudder to think what the legal paperwork for a blockbuster looks like, it's probably enough to fill several bookcases.

Of course it would be nice if one single service/platform was able to deliver any movie imaginable to some objective standard of quality. But it's not going to happen absent some sort of compulsory licensing scheme, which would run into huge legal/constitutional obstacles in many jurisdictions. Imagine you're the publisher of the film and SuperFilmPlatform.com can start start streaming it without your permission and without you having any say in what you get paid - you'd want to bomb their offices and/or exit the market. How would you ensure fair compensation in an environment that allowed compulsory licensing? Through government price controls? That's basically communism for artists/publishers, capitalism for the distributors. As you're no doubt aware, communism and free artistic expression have a poor record of compatibility.

First sale seemed to work OK for movie rentals so a form of digital first sale might work for streaming. We'll probably never find out, though.

This looks great, congratulations.

That said, the one takeaway I got from exploring your site is that almost all the interesting movies that I picked were only available to rent for $5 or buy for over $15. I'm not even in the US, but those prices seem a little far-fetched for watching a movie at home. Netflix has been a step in the right direction but as the studios wake up to this model, it seems the catalogues are becoming fragmented making it cost-prohibitive for consumers to buy multiple subscriptions.

Actually, while building the site we noticed a quite different feeling. As it's much easier to change subscriptions (usually they are not longer than a month), it's much easier to rotate through different providers with often widely different and interesting content. A lot of the newer and more odd contenders I didn't know before building JustWatch. I personally discovered Mubi with a sexy business model of just 30 hand picked movies, which is just 5 bucks a month and it's cool people see there are actually some good choices other than Netflix out there. Really curious to see how the market will react.

If it was a dollar or two to rent a movie, I'd rent a lot more. $5 seems excessive when I can buy the blu-ray version for a few dollars more.

most movies I only ever want to see once. Actually, most movies I don't even finish. I watch fewer and fewer movies since I don't want to take the chance that I'll turn it off half way through or even 15 minutes in.

I can't imagine wanting to fill up my physical or digital movie shelf with things I might not even like. I'm much more likely to buy a blu ray or dvd if I've already seen it and enjoyed it. That and kids dvds for the car are the only movies I ever purchase.

Because I know that I am extremely unlikely to buy a movie I am happy to pay anything less than the purchase price to rent it if that's the only way to see it. I paid less and got exactly the value I would have gotten if I purchased it. More actually because now it's not taking up physical, digital or mental space.

How does this compare to http://canistream.it? Does it offer any different functionality?

How are your search results generated? I searched for "Witch Hunter Robin" and got 30 results, none of which were that show (and many of which don't even seem to be related to the search query, such as "Red: Werewolf Hunter"). For comparison, canistream.it gave me a single result for that query, which was the show I wanted. Granted, the show isn't available on any streaming provider (canistream.it says it's available on Cable Xfinity only). Do you only provide matches for shows that are actually available somewhere?

Also, curiously, your site lists "Good Will Hunting" under the title "Will Hunting".

Edit: The site does appear to be quite fast, which is nice. And you have a mobile-optimized version, which is great as I nearly always perform these kinds of searches on my iPhone.

The most obvious thing to me is that I can filter on multiple sources with JustWatch, and only a single source on Can I Stream It (in regards to the gallery view).

I really just use CISI for looking up a very specific thing. JustWatch might improve discoverability.

The UK experience isn't very good because the netflix listings are the US listings.

(Which just serves to remind me how much better netflix US is and makes me think of cancelling netflix UK.)

You can use a VPN from the UK and it works well - there are others around, but I use hola on Chrome and Firefox and it works pretty well, for free - http://hola.org/

Using Hola will allow other users to use your connection and their privacy policy is awful: http://hola.org/legal_privacy

Just spin up a VPS and install OpenVPN on it. I use ansible but used to use this one-shot script here: https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

When I click through to iTunes from (e.g.) 2001: A Space Odyssey the pricing is different than listed on the site ($9.99 vs. $14.99).

EDIT: Also, the title on the detail page is "How the Solar System Was Won (1968)" which, IMDB lists as a "working title." To be fair, this looks like the first entry in the "Also Known As" section of the IMDB release info page[1] that has a country of "USA".

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/releaseinfo

Would be nice if you showed a movie title and perhaps an IMDB link where there's an exact title match, but no one streams it yet: e.g. for https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=american%20hustle should show a link to the IMDB page http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/ and maybe a YouTube link to its trailer.

To clarify:

"Popcorn Time used to look better than anything legal, so we fixed it"

... so now here's something legal that looks as good as (or better than) Popcorn Time.

This is nice, a more attractive alternative to http://www.canistream.it

It would be great to be able to set buy/rent/stream filters alongside selecting providers. If you know you don't want to buy, for example, the current interface relies on a lot of clicking.

Nice work!

Another nice alternative is http://moreflicks.com/ - especially as it includes all netflix regions (which justwatch doesn't) as well as BBC iPlayer.

Edit: Just saw that justwatch actually includes international offers - the submission links to the US-section though.

Looks great! How does it load so fast!! I am more amazed with the page load. Can you share any secret sauce ?

Thanks so much! Let me think. Cloudfront, heavy NGINX caching, precompiling JS assets, using Go as a backend language, doing as few requests as humanly possible and lots of hard work. No silver bullets unfortunately, but some smaller nice tricks like using Thumbor as a Cloudfront custom origin. We'll definitely share some stuff on our engineering blog soon!

as someone who has worked on really large angular apps (and also someone who knows a bunch of the ng core guys) the load time on this is terrific and was pretty surprised by how quickly ng-repeat rendered. did you have to do anything special (i could probably poke around the code more but i thought asking might give me more insight)?

Yeah, would love to read more. BTW where are you pulling the assets (images, info) etc ?

Infinite scroll is broken, fyi. It starts back at the very beginning when the first batch comes in.

"Popcorn Time used to look better than anything legal, so we fixed it"

Fixed what exactly? This site just aggregates info on where you can find a movie and pay an absurd price for it. I already knew that I could pay $20 for a movie. No thanks.

I think they mean they made a legal alternative/equivalent to Popcorn Time that looks just as good. Not particularly useful or innovative, but I guess it does look alright.

You know what would be interesting? If the site also had a filter for streaming/digital rental and digital buying. It'd be a pretty concrete example of how terrible the digital media buying landscape is as you'd see the list of titles shrink to basically nothing (since DRM-laden purchases obviously shouldn't count - that's just renting with an undefined rental period, not actual buying).

While you're at it, you could also add a country filter to have yet another way to reduce the list to nothing, showing yet another great feature of the legitimate digital media landscape - region locking!

Very nice. I plan to use this the next time we search for a movie to watch on Family Movie & Pizza Night. It can some times take like 30 minutes just to search the various subscription sites we use (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc) to find a movie. We try to find a free one first but when we can't, we then check around for which service has it cheapest. Seems this is going to make searching a whole lot easier. Thanks!

Would be great if I could also filter by rating. And exclude those that are "Buy" only.

Seems to have some bugs arond movies with the same title. For example, I clicked on "inside man":

1. Navigate to https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/inside-man

2. Observe the photos and descriptions for the 2006 denzel washington version

3. Click on the "prime instant video" streaming link

4. Observe that the movie starts playing but it is the much older "Dennis hopper" movie of the same name

Nice job, I often find it frustrating to find new movies in the interfaces provided on streaming providers' websites.

That being said, one very minor critique. When filtering on release year where I only want to display the last 2 or 3 years, the slider interface is a bit awkward with overlapping year labels making it difficult to read what is selected.

Would also be nice to see more advanced filter options added, but great start!

Looks like there's a problem with displaying content in one language, but pulling descriptions from the wrong store language.

'THE EQUALIZER - WATCH ONLINE: STREAMING, BUY OR RENT

You can buy _"Le Justicier"_ on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies, Apple iTunes as download or rent it on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies, Apple iTunes online.'

It's a nice looking interface. Obviously you're trying to make a point that legal alternatives should be as nicely made and attractive as illegal ones, and some are dinging you for it. But regardless of the motive it's well done. Perhaps think about maintaining my scroll position when I click down to a detail view of a film and then back.

Nicely done! Hi to Berlin! As others have stated, the load time and completeness of the catalog is impressive. Also has - no surprise - providers specific to Germany here https://www.justwatch.com/de

@op: Some background on the sourcing/aggregation process would be very interesting.

Well done leaking our German site... okay, wasn't hidden too hard :)

As for the aggregation, it's much deeper and more interesting than the simple surface will make you think. We've handbuilt a massive, distributed crawler framework in Golang just for this purpose. Will surely share more on our engineering blog as time passes!

Where can I find the blog?

probably https://engineering.justwatch.com as soon as we're done celebrating and TV shows are in :)

That looks great and has gone straight into my Favourites.

I look forward to you expanding to include the UK!

This is great! Thanks for building this!

I use my Roku's universal search to do this now, but I can only use it on the device. Having this function in a website is so useful!

Suggestion: automatically highlight Hulu when I choose "Hulu Plus"

I have a lot of use for this. Love the distinction between Amazon Prime and Purchase as well as the Hulu Plus and Hulu regular.

Any chance you could include premium streaming services such as HBO Go, Max Go, and Showtime Anytime?

The item you've requested is not currently available in the * Store, but it is available in the U.S. Store. Click Change Store to view this item.

Nice product, though

Does it do Pandora-style recommendations like Jinni [1]? I only see popular and new titles.

[1] http://www.jinni.com/

Nice! If anyone wants TV shows & episodes as well as movies, plus all the sources, Guidebox.com shows you both. Guidebox also support 150+ apps/sites including tv networks, hulu, all the digital media stores, etc. and provide a Developer API. I made the new iOS and Android apps which take you to the right app to play the movie or show you choose (or the app store if that source app is not installed.)

http://vlad.github.com

is my portfolio with some screenshots while the apps are pending review, but you can visit guidebox.com to start using it today.

I get repeat videos. I've selected netflix and amazon prime.

There's about 20 unique items, then repeats of all of those rows, then fresh content.

Is this different than the existing http://www.canistream.it/

Yup. Different page, different people, different providers.

No Crunchyroll?

This looks really nice! I'd love to see it include the mpaa rating and be able to filter by it.

Any reason not to put affiliate strings on your iTunes links? Didn't spot any when I looked.

By year is pretty cool. Even a film made in 1900. Working my way to the future now.

Implementing IMDB / RT scoring would definitely add value to your service

Are you going to add coverage for television/episodic content?

Definitely. Working on it as we speak.

Black screen with third-party cookie blocking and Ghostery enabled.

"SecurityError: The operation is insecure. mc-webapp-0.1.9.js:17"

Fail.

Hi Animats - thanks for noticing. We know we still have a bug with stealth mode but decided to launch anyway. Will be fixed by tomorrow.

Thanks. I run very locked down browsers, and it's amusing to see what sites break. Some of the effects are strange. I can't watch video on ABC, while video on CBS plays without ads.

this is exactly what i've been looking for. Thanks!

would be great to see HBO Go as well.

this is exactly what i've been looking for. Thanks! maybe add hbo go?

'big hero 6' $19.99

Dream on K? thx. bye.

15 dollars to stream Nightcrawler, when a movie ticket might cost half that. What am I paying for exactly?

Nightcrawler ... the streamed version.

To be fair, that's the cost to buy it. If you watch it with three friends you're saving money. Plus you can watch it again and again if that's your thing.

Movies have been ~$15-20 for a long time. I'd guess not much of that cost was physical media.

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