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Here’s Another Movie and TV Search Site. This One’s From Hollywood.

This one has no ads, and comes to us from the MPAA.

Wheretowatch.com
Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

There are so many places to find movies and TV shows. They’re on TV! They’re on the Internet! Wouldn’t it be great if there were services that told you where you could find all that stuff?

There are! Several of them, actually. But the problem is that none of them have everything you want.

Now, here’s another one: Wheretowatch.com, which does what it sounds like — you type in the name of a movie or a TV show, it tells you some places you can stream them online, via download stores like iTunes and subscription services like Netflix.

Just like Canistream.it, and Flixster, and NextGuide and TV.com.

Wheretowatch does have two distinguishing factors, though. It doesn’t have ads, and it’s built by the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s trade group.

For the record, the MPAA thinks that building this site gives you even more incentive not to steal its studios’ product, since it demonstrates how easy it is get this stuff legally. But I doubt anyone who’s getting free stuff from Popcorn Time is going to rethink their actions because of this one.

Like all of these services, Wheretowatch has a blind spot, and in this case it’s pay TV. If you ask Wheretowatch about Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” for instance, it will tell you that you can buy digital copies of the movie from iTunes and Amazon — but not that it’s showing on HBO this week, and streaming on HBO Go.

But all of this seems like very Version 1.0 stuff right now. Someone’s eventually going to figure out that getting everything in one place is really useful to lots of people, and they’ll figure out how to solve the biz dev issues — this isn’t a technical hurdle — to get it done.

Who knows? They might even get us to pay for it.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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