How to (Sometimes) Find Your Favorite Movies Online

I ought to be the movie industry’s best customer. I’m a rabid movie buff with money to spend on my habit.

When digital, streaming movies first started to become available, though, I was a frustrated movie buff. A lot of movies were not available online. As recently as late 2012, you couldn’t rent movies like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, A Beautiful Mind, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Saving Private Ryan, or Meet the Fockers online. Your choices were: buy the DVD or watch illegally. Good job, Hollywood. Remember Napster?

Most of those movies have since become rentable online, but movie fans are still frustrated by the industry’s antiquated “windowing” system. After a movie is finished in the theaters, it slowly makes its way through the movie industry’s exclusive time “windows”: first to hotels; then to pay-per-view systems, to DVD, to HBO, and, only then, to online rental. It may appear and disappear after that.

Furthermore, for some bizarre reason, certain movies aren’t always available on all services (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, etc.).

Bottom line: If you want to rent a particular movie tonight, prepare to go on a hunt.

Slowly but surely, the MPAA is wising up. (The MPAA is the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group that represents the six biggest Hollywood studios.) It has finally decided to encourage movie fans to rent movies online — by creating a website that helps you find them. It’s called www.wheretowatch.com.

Finding movies

In theory, WhereToWatch is exactly what the doctor ordered. You type in a movie name and press Enter —

— and you get to see which movie services offer it online:

In practice, though, there’s a reason why the site is labeled “beta”: It’s kind of a mess. Here are some of the problems:

It can’t search Netflix, YouTube, or Google Play. WhereToWatch says that it knows what movies are available at Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Flixster, Vudu, Xbox Video, and a few more obscure sites. But it’s missing a few of the biggies, such as YouTube and Google Play.

In fact, when my long-suffering assistant Jan painstakingly conducted a sample search of 50 movies, WhereToWatch never produced any listings from Netflix, even though that’s supposed to be one of its sources.

If you didn’t know about that bug, you might wind up paying $4 each for movies that might have been free as part of your Netflix streaming subscription.

(The company says that it “pulls availabilities from providers who offer an API feed — WTW does not currently utilize other methods of acquiring availabilities.” OK then.)

The database has errors. If you feel like watching Inception, WhereToWatch would have you believe that you can’t get it on the iTunes Store:

Actually, you can. iTunes does have Inception to rent:

(The competing service, GoWatchIt.com, also has this one wrong; CanIStream.It has it correct.)

The old guard

The goofy thing about WhereToWatch is that it’s trying to reinvent a wheel that was invented and polished a long time ago. At least two other websites serve as directories to which movies are available where — and they don’t have the problems of the MPAA’s new site.

They’re CanIStream.It and GoWatchIt.com.

They’re just what you’d expect. You type in the movie you’re seeking, and boom: Read which sites offer them, for rent and for sale. Here’s CanIStream.It’s display for Antz:

It couldn’t be clearer. You can stream it free if you’re a Netflix member, or for $3 from iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, or Sony. Or you can buy it for a price ranging from $10 (Google, Vudu) to $14 (Apple).

GoWatchIt’s results convey the same information, but it’s harder to understand. That’s partly because of the graphic design, and partly because the results are organized by store rather than delivery method (stream, rent, buy):

My guess is that most people, most of the time, would prefer the information organized by delivery method. “I want to rent this movie online — where is it cheapest?” That’s how CanIStream.It does things, and it makes more sense.

WhereToWatch (the MPAA site), meanwhile, doesn’t even mention the free Netflix streaming. Also, it takes an extra click to get here. (After the search, you get a list of search results with only one item, which you have to click.)

Both CanIStream.It and GoWatchIt.com have excellent phone apps that offer the same information as the websites (organized the same way):

And both let you sign up for notifications, so that you’ll know when an unavailable movie becomes available.

A modest suggestion

What the movie industry needs is a lesson in friction. In economic terms, that means “how hard it is to buy something from you.” Amazon’s “1-Click” buy button? That’s low friction. One click, and your product is on its way. By making it so hard to find, watch, and pay for movies, Hollywood is creating highfriction and leaving millions of dollars on the table.

It seems as though the MPAA spends more time and effort chasing down the bad guys (movie pirates) than it spends making movies easier to rent for thegood guys. The fact that it has created WhereToWatch.com is an excellent sign that it has started to understand the importance of low friction in transactions.

But WhereToWatch.com, the movie industry’s attempt to create a directory, isless useful than its rivals, which were created by small, independent teams. That’s both worrisome and, somehow, predictable. Apparently, creating a huge, centralized, complex, ever-changing database on the Web isn’t as easy as it seems. (See also: healthcare.gov.)

Until the MPAA can fix its site — both the design and the information it provides — you should bookmark CanIStream.It and use that instead.

None of the sites offers 100 percent accurate, up-to-date listings; very often, they’ll tell you that a movie is not available from some service, when, in fact, it is. (They almost never make the opposite mistake.) The prices are sometimes wrong, and sometimes missing (especially on GoWatchIt.com). And one other finding: The availability and pricing lists on Google Play and YouTube are almost identical, since Google owns YouTube.

(To see what kind of information is wrong, check out Jan’s master spreadsheet of the results of 50 searches of four movie-rental sites on the three directory sites.)

All of the directory sites say that the errors are part of the data fed to them from their sources.

You know what? The movie studios, the MPAA, and the online rental stores can do better. If they want people to defeat movie piracy, they should take away our reasons to pirate movies.