For I don’t know how long, I’ve used Television Time to track the shows I watch (or have watched) because it’s easy. It’s one of those apps that’s helpful but also aims to primarily do one thing and do it well (something I was also writing about 12 years ago).

Obviously, I’m a fan of those types of projects.

A few months ago, one of my kids was asking where should could watch a specific show. A fair question given the amount of streaming services available and since shows and movies are available on one, a couple, some, or all, and are available for rent and/or purchase depending on one, some, or all of those services.

Coincidentally, I was also looking for a small project to work on on the side so I took her question, where can I watch whatever-the-show-is, and started working on an iOS app using React Native. And while I was working on it, I thought I’d go ahead and make sure it’d work on Android, too.

But that was a false start.

Where Can I Watch?

Suffice it to say, the cost of an Apple Developer License and the need to have as much parity as possible between iOS and Android especially when you’re trying to maintain the same design language as well as the various dependencies required to get the emulators set up locally quickly exceeded what I consider to be territory for a side project. Given all of that, I went back to the most ubiquitous platform we have: The web.

Even still, the goal of Where Can I Watch? was simple:

A mobile application that makes it easy to find where to watch a show or movie.

And I started working on the project again. And now here’s Where Can I Watch? It’s a simple app that returns results for exactly where you can watch a given show or movie:

And that’s it: Nothing to download, no accounts, no social aspects, no links, nothing else. Enter a title you want to watch and then see where you can find it.

You can add this bookmark to your browser or to the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Android, obviously.

Finally, this is one of those projects that lends itself to constant tinkering so, as time and desire allow, I’ll make changes. As I do, I’ll talk about them here and potentially add a small page on the site that tracks what was rolled out and when.

Tech Stack

And for those of you who are interested, here’s a high-level explanation for what was used to build this:

You can view all of the source code for the project on GitHub. There’s a single doc that outlines some of the technical details of the project, too.