ストリーミングサービス戦国時代の便利ツール？「JustWatch(ジャストウォッチ)」

I have two essential pandemic companions: cheese and a website called JustWatch.

JustWatch isn’t particularly fancy, but it tells me where I can watch a particular show or movie that I’m looking for online. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is.

When I read recently about a decade-old British comedy series, “Miranda,” JustWatch showed me that it was streaming for free on the Roku Channel. It identified which episodes of a fun British home-building show, “Grand Designs,” are on Netflix and which are missing. I wouldn’t have found this out otherwise. Even Google doesn’t spit out this information.

JustWatch isn’t perfect, and it’s not curing the coronavirus. But it (mostly) solves a small annoyance of at-home life.

The website exists because streaming entertainment is glorious — and an unruly mess. Companies care more about their bottom lines than their customers, so as streaming services scatter entertainment around like confetti, it’s often impossible to figure out how they work together.

Mostly, I want to revel in what works about JustWatch.

David Croyé, the company’s chief executive, told me that JustWatch computers constantly probe under the hood of more than 1,000 streaming video services and digital download catalogs from companies like Apple and Amazon. There are tens of thousands of entertainment options that constantly change and vary by country.

Croyé said that JustWatch made it “easier for people to navigate the jungle of content and streaming services.”

Lots of companies say they do this. Very few do.

Apple touts its online video app called TV as a hub for people to watch anything on their streaming services. Nope. Apple doesn’t catalog options from Netflix, for example. You’ll encounter similar gaps or confusionhunting for stuff on streaming gadgets like Amazon’s Fire TV. It just doesn’t work.

Why? Money.

Netflix doesn’t want to let competitors like Apple or Amazon peer into its entertainment roster — or it wants to get paid for it. No streaming company wants to point you to “Love & Basketball” on a rival service. Google searches for streaming shows can return unreliable junk.

JustWatch is an island of reprieve, partly because it’s not powerful enough for anyone to fear.

It won’t tell you what’s on regular TV tonight, and it makes mistakes. Margaret Lyons, my colleague who writes the Watching newsletter, uses JustWatch “constantly,” she said, but finds it sometimes says shows are available places they’re not. (Margaret also uses Flixable, a searchable database for several streaming services.)

Other companies like Roku started out promising to be neutral streaming helpers and didn’t stay that way. JustWatch could have that problem.

It makes money by harnessing data on what people watch to tailor entertainment companies’ strategies. Sony’s movie studio might use JustWatch’s information to target online movie trailers to horror film fans.

It can be a red flag when companies make money from data rather than people using their products. You could imagine that JustWatch might steer us to watch “Paddington” on Hulu because the company pays for the recommendation. Croyé said that it would be counterproductive if JustWatch betrayed our trust that way.

There is still no universal guide to the new TV, because streaming entertainment is a mess. (Have I mentioned this?) But for now, JustWatch feels like the next best thing.