JustWatch, the app many of us open to find out where a film or TV show is streaming, now wants you to stay and watch it there.
The company has launched JustWatch TV, its own streaming service, in the UK and 10 other countries. It’s built straight into the existing JustWatch app and website, and it comes in three flavours: a free tier with adverts, a store for renting newer films, and an ad-free Plus tier for £3.99 a month.
If you watch TV on an Amazon Fire TV stick, though, you’ll have to wait – JustWatch TV isn’t on Amazon’s devices yet.
I’ve been digging through the free tier, and Birdman and The Big Short, the two films in all the publicity shots, along with very few others, are pretty much where the familiar names end.
What Is JustWatch?
If you’ve never used it, JustWatch is a streaming guide. You search for a film or TV show, and it tells you where you can watch it – which subscription services include it, whether it’s free anywhere, and where you can rent or buy it.
The Berlin-based company says it has more than 50 million users across 140 markets, and that it tracks over 500,000 films and shows across more than 1,500 streaming services.
Its data also powers the “where to watch” sections of more than 1,400 other websites and apps.
We’ve recommended it in our guide to cutting the cord for years, as the quickest way to check whether a show is actually on a service before you sign up for a month to watch it.
Until now, though, JustWatch only ever pointed you somewhere else. With JustWatch TV, some of those results now point back to JustWatch itself.
David Croyé, JustWatch’s founder and CEO, said the new service “will help fill in the gaps” and make it easier for its users to watch films and series, “including those hard-to-find titles, right from the app itself.”
JustWatch TV’s Three Tiers And Prices
JustWatch TV Free is the free, ad-supported part of the service. When I filtered the UK catalogue for free titles, there were 241 films and TV shows.
JustWatch TV Store is where you rent films, including more recent and popular titles such as Top Gun: Maverick, The Godfather, Forrest Gump and Collateral.
Prices vary by film: the rentals I looked at cost £3.49 or £4.49. For now, it’s rentals only – JustWatch has said the option to buy films will come later.
JustWatch TV Plus costs £3.99 a month after a seven-day free trial. It removes the adverts, takes 10% off rentals, and adds extra features in the JustWatch app itself.
What Plus doesn’t do is add more films. JustWatch’s own sign-up screen sums up the offer as “180+ titles ad-free & 40+ more free” – so what you’re paying for is the adverts going away.
There’s also a “Lifetime” option: a one-off payment of £49.99. That’s the same as about 12 and a half months of Plus, so it pays for itself if you’re still using the service in just over a year.
I’d think twice before paying for “lifetime” on a service that launched just this week, though. A lifetime deal lasts only as long as the service behind it – and digital services do close.
When TalkTalk shut down its TV Store in 2023, customers lost access to films they’d already paid for, and were offered compensation instead.
What’s Actually On The Free Tier?
So, as usual with this type of service – and especially in the UK – the free-with-adverts tier is mostly full of titles you’ve never heard of.
There are a select few you will know. Beyond Birdman and The Big Short, there’s BBC comedy People Just Do Nothing, Australian prison drama Wentworth, and cult favourites like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.
There’s also a row of titles JustWatch says are free only on JustWatch TV, such as Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, The Quiet Earth and Man in an Orange Shirt.
Still, there are a few hidden gems and indie darlings in there. If you dig deep enough – not that there’s a lot to dig into with 241 titles – you’ll find something to watch for an evening in front of the TV.
And hey, it’s free, so we shouldn’t complain.
Another Free Streaming App?
The bigger problem is that JustWatch TV joins a long line of free-with-adverts services that keep popping up everywhere.
In the UK alone, there’s Tubi’s huge free library, which had grown to more than 40,000 films and TV episodes by last year – most of them, as we’ve found, things you’ve likely never heard of.
Rakuten TV has its own free, ad-supported films alongside its store. And Amazon decided it didn’t need a separate free brand at all, shutting down Freevee and moving its free shows into Prime Video.
And it’s not just apps. Free streaming channels are popping up all over the place too. These FAST channels (short for Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) work like ordinary TV channels, with a schedule and advert breaks, but they come over the internet – and many are built around a single show.
Just this week, Freely got 12 new channels from UKTV, including ones dedicated entirely to EastEnders, Top Gear and Casualty. That’s after 5 added 11 channels to Freely in one go in July, and Channel 4 launched its own streaming-only channels last year.
Between the apps and the channels, we get the same selection over and over again. And even when it isn’t exactly the same selection, it sure feels the same, because it’s the same type of content.
JustWatch says its catalogue is picked using billions of data points about what its users actually want to watch, to complement what’s already on other services. That may be true, but browse the free tier and it still feels like the same kind of library.
So the main question becomes: do we even bother to open the app?
JustWatch’s One Big Advantage
This is where JustWatch has a point in its favour. Its base service is good, and it’s one we already open for other reasons – to find out where a film or TV show is streaming.
So if you open it anyway, and you discover that the film you were looking for is available to watch on JustWatch TV (or, more likely, to rent there), you might as well press play there. JustWatch’s own description of the service is that it takes you “from search to stream”.
That does raise a question for a guide whose whole value lies in pointing you to every option: will its own service start getting pride of place in those results? We’ll be watching.
It’s also clear what JustWatch gets out of it, beyond advert and subscription money. The company says JustWatch TV will provide “even deeper audience data and insights” for JustWatch Media, its business that plans film marketing campaigns on YouTube, Meta and TikTok for studios, distributors and streaming services.
Fire TV Owners Will Have To Wait
JustWatch TV is available on the JustWatch website and its phone apps, as well as on Android TV and Google TV, Apple TV, LG’s webOS TVs and Roku.
There is a JustWatch app on Amazon’s Fire TV devices, but it doesn’t include JustWatch TV yet.
When we asked JustWatch about it, the company told us that an updated Fire TV app is awaiting approval and is coming soon.
Samsung TVs aren’t on the list either, although JustWatch says more platforms will follow.
In the meantime, you can still use JustWatch TV through the website or the phone app – just not through the JustWatch app on a Fire TV.
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