JustWatch Now Sells the Kind of Subscription It Was Built to Help You Sort Out

The app people use to find out where something is streaming has launched its own streaming service, and this is exactly the kind of move that ends up pushing people toward piracy.

JustWatch TV went live on October 20, inside the existing JustWatch app and website. It has three parts: a free tier with ads, a rental store, and JustWatch TV Plus, an ad-free subscription at $3.99 a month. It launched in 11 markets (the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand) with 30 content partners, among them Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media. The rental store starts in only five of those markets: the US, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. JustWatch says its guide reaches more than 50 million people a month.

What the launch coverage does not include is a detailed catalog. It names partners, not titles, and gives no size for the free tier.

Where a company sees an opportunity, it launches a subscription that does not even cover what people need. How far JustWatch will go with ads, and whether a detailed catalog will ever show up, remains to be seen. That part is speculation on my side.

Before giving it a chance I would need to see everything: the catalog, the price and how it fits with what I already pay. The problem with subscription services is that none of them gives you a catalog with everything you actually want to watch. That has been true for years, and in my view it is the reason people end up pirating: in most cases not to save money, but because piracy is simpler and more direct.

To be fair, the surveys on piracy do not fully back me up on the money part. Research such as the UK Intellectual Property Office’s online infringement tracker lists cost next to availability and convenience, so the order of those reasons is my reading, not a measured fact.

JustWatch TV Plus costs $3.99 a month at launch, and the titles on offer change by country.