Are there services that provide such data for users throughout the world? I wonder if the data just isn’t readily available.
It really isn’t as available as it should be. You have to cobble it together pretty much one at a time and then the real trick is getting all the data matched up as you traverse various content ids, titles, season and episode breakdowns etc. As you add regions, this gets astronomically more complex.
There are a few providers that supply the data for a fee, but many have large gaps (Gracenote and GoWatchIt both are around 60-70% accuracy at best) and almost none have international data. We own a provider called Guidebox which we acquired last year as they’re most accurate supplier of 3rd party streaming info here in the states.
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I use JastWatch, which can switch to 30+ countries.
–e.
Update because I happened to run across this again: JustWatch now does have an Apple TV app, and it seems to be superior to Reelgood’s in that it allows you to search and add to your lists, which Reelgood cannot do on the TV. Reelgood’s Apple TV app also does not support custom lists, even though their website (but not their iOS apps) does. When asked about this discrepancy, Reelgood support replied,
The Apple TV app was actually a hackathon project which we are no longer able to maintain at the moment (but will hopefully pick back up in the coming years).
Given this, and the fact that JustWatch’s Apple apps do support custom lists, I’m planning to switch from Reelgood to JustWatch.
JustWatch also seems to have narrowed the gap in number of streaming services supported as well.
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I tried JustWatch myself - mostly when Reelgood was flaky for me, not finding new episodes, etc., probably about a year or so ago. But my pet peeve with JustWatch is that it doesn’t (and won’t) default to the Lists page. That’s what I primarily do with these apps - mark off the episodes and movies that I’ve watched, plus checking which movies are now streaming. So Reelgood just works better for me.
Frankly I just want to use the iPhone or iPad app and wouldn’t use it on Apple TV myself.
And to @elichamberlin , I just don’t care all that much about using an app like this for discovery. I just search for what I want to search for and depend on my much longer list of things I haven’t watched yet (compared with what I am actually watching) rather than search for something to watch. I depend on journalists generally (and friends sometimes as well) for recommendations. So please make sure that Reelgood will always allow me to make “watch next” the home page.
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I’ve been been using reelgood for years now to let me know when movies I want to see show up on my non-streaming premium channels: HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc. Only downsize is it will tell me a show is on Max but it isn’t on HBO. I have Max but I will not watch a movie on it.
Do you wish to elaborate?
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I have Max via my HBO subscription. Any show broadcast on HBO via my cable box has far superior audio than the same show on the Max app.
I have a Sony Android TV hooked up to an AVR by an optical cable. I get Dolby Digital discrete 5.1 channel sound from the TV cable box (via the TV), Plex and Netflix apps. But not from Max or Paramount+! For some reason those apps will only output stereo which my AVR processes as matrixed Dolby Surround.
My suspicion is that apps don’t get DD to output through the optical connection unless they go through extra effort – something that Warner Brothers-Discovery and Paramount haven’t bothered to do.
I used to think it was because Max does DD+, which would not go through the optical (max it supports is 5.1). So, my theory was, the Max app says “can this TV do DD+? No? Then we’ll fall back to just two channel stereo”. But Max changed so that “free” subscribers who get it because they have HBO no longer get DD+ audio. So much for that theory. I’m back to the incompetent programmer explanation.
Assuming your AVR can send the appropriate level video signal to your TV, I find it better to connect streaming and cable boxes to the the AVR and send the video to the TV. Unfortunately, traditionally, most TV’s optical port only sends DD audio from the TV’s internal tuner; you must use an HDMI-ARC port to transmit Dolby Digital or higher-level audio to the receiver. I get the best results by connecting cable boxes and streaming devices to the AVR and sending the video signal to the TV via HDMI. I rarely use any of the TV’s HDMI ports except as output from the AVR.
I upgraded last year to a 4K TV and a Denon S970 receiver and can usually get up to Dolby Atmos sound from connected devices. I can also get it from the TV and its apps or anything plugged into its ports since the monitor port on the AVR is connected to the HDMI-eARC port on the TV.
Note: except for my Blu-Ray player, CEC allows me to turn everything on and off by turning on the cable or streaming box from my remote. Occasionally, the wrong source shows up on the AVR, but that is easy to notice and correct.
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The TV is my streaming device.
That’s not the case with my TV since the Plex and Netflix apps both output DD audio.
My AVR doesn’t support ARC. And even if it did, I’m not sure that it would be guaranteed to fix Max and Paramount+.
ARC basically has the same specifications as S/PDIF bitstream over the optical cable, with the same limitations. For DD+ you need eARC, which my TV doesn’t support. So if the problem truly is that the app downgrades to stereo when DD+ isn’t supported, ARC wouldn’t work either.
That’s my current setup as well, but I may change this in the future, because my AVR supports eARC, but doesn’t support HDR video beyond HD10. If I want to take advantage of DolbyVision (which my 4KBD player and Apple TV can both output) then I need to connect directly to the TV. So I may move those two devices at some point in the future.