We Have More to Watch Than Ever. So Why Is It So Hard to Choose?

Most nights, the problem in our house isn’t that there’s nothing to watch.

It’s the opposite.

My wife and I will sit down on the couch, open Netflix, start scrolling, switch to Prime, scroll some more, maybe check another service, read a few descriptions, watch a trailer, reject something because it looks too dark, reject something else because it looks stupid, then circle back to Netflix.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, there’s a very real chance we just put on Seinfeld again.

Which is ridiculous when you think about it.

We have access to more movies and television than anyone in history, yet actually choosing something can feel harder than it used to.

When TV chose for us

Before streaming, there was a completely different problem.

You turned on the television and watched what was on.

Maybe you had 30 channels. Maybe 100. Maybe the movie you wanted to see wasn’t playing at all.

We complained about that, and rightly so.

But there was one advantage we probably didn’t appreciate at the time:

The decision was mostly made for us.

If a movie started at 8:00, you either watched it or you didn’t. If your favourite show was on Thursday night, that’s what you watched Thursday night.

There was friction because we didn’t have enough choice.

Streaming solved that problem spectacularly.

Then it gave us the opposite one.

Infinite choice isn’t always better

Today there are thousands upon thousands of movies available across Netflix, Prime Video, Tubi, Pluto TV, Roku and services most people have probably never even heard of.

In theory, this should be amazing.

And it is.

But there’s a strange point where more choice stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like work.

You don’t really want to browse 5,000 movies.

You want to watch one good movie.

Those aren’t the same thing.

And I suspect most of us secretly want more help making that decision than we’re willing to admit.

We say we want endless choice.

What we actually want is:

Give me a few good choices that make sense for me.

Better still:

Just choose one.

That’s the idea behind Pick Better Movies

Pick Better Movies is my attempt to combine the best parts of those two eras.

Streaming gives us enormous choice.

Old-fashioned television gave us simplicity.

I want to marry the two.

Keep the enormous catalogue, but let something intelligent narrow it down for you.

And not with the same recommendation for everybody.

The point is for the system to understand you.

Not simply:

This movie has a 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Or:

People who watched this also watched that.

I want to be able to say things like:

I want to watch something good tonight, but I don’t want to think too hard.

Or:

I want something light, but not stupid.

Or:

I’m fine with a slow movie if it’s actually developing interesting characters.

Or even:

I’m tired of dark movies about kidnapped children, sexual violence, addiction and people being miserable for two hours. Give me something lighter without giving me something brainless.

Those are real preferences.

And sometimes they’re much more useful than saying:

I like thrillers.

Ratings tell you what other people liked

I use Rotten Tomatoes. I use IMDb. Metacritic can be useful.

They’re all answering legitimate questions.

But they aren’t necessarily answering the question I care about most:

Will I like this movie tonight?

A highly rated movie can be completely wrong for you.

A movie sitting at 6.7 on IMDb that critics mostly ignored might be exactly your kind of thing.

Because sometimes what matters most isn’t quality in some abstract sense.

It’s fit.

Maybe you’re exhausted.

Maybe you’re watching with your spouse.

Maybe you want something under two hours.

Maybe subtitles are fine tonight but not tomorrow.

Maybe you want something funny without watching a broad comedy.

Maybe you want a thriller without spending the evening watching somebody get tortured.

Maybe you want something intelligent, but you don’t want to spend two hours trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

That context matters.

And that’s the kind of thing I want Pick Better Movies to understand.

Then there’s all the free stuff

This is another big reason I wanted to build this.

Streaming was supposed to replace cable and make entertainment simpler and cheaper.

Instead, it’s incredibly easy to end up paying for Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Crave, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and whatever else you happen to be subscribed to that month.

Add everything up and suddenly you can be spending more on streaming than you ever did on cable.

That’s complete BS.

Especially because there’s an enormous amount of genuinely good entertainment available for free.

Tubi alone has a huge catalogue. Then there’s Pluto TV, Roku, Plex and a long list of other legitimate free streaming services.

The problem is that browsing those catalogues can feel like walking into a warehouse.

Somewhere in there might be a fantastic thriller from 1987 that you’ve never heard of.

A forgotten Western from the 1970s.

A strange little science-fiction movie.

An independent drama that disappeared without much attention.

Something you might absolutely love.

But how are you supposed to find it?

You could spend hours scrolling.

That’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem.

And it might be the part of Pick Better Movies I’m most interested in.

Find the movie you didn’t know you were looking for

I don’t want Pick Better Movies to become another giant movie database.

We already have those.

I don’t want it to respond to uncertainty by giving you 50 recommendations.

That just creates another list to scroll through.

I want it to do the opposite.

Tell it what you like.

Tell it what you don’t.

Tell it what kind of night you’re having.

Tell it what streaming services you have.

Tell it whether you’re willing to rent something or whether you want something completely free.

Then let it go digging.

Search thousands of movies.

Look past the obvious ones.

Find the weird little title you would never have discovered yourself.

And come back with something like:

Watch this.

Here’s why I think you’ll like it.

Here’s the one thing that might put you off.

And here’s where you can watch it.

Maybe give me two backups.

Then stop.

No endless scrolling.

No 47-item list.

No spending half an hour deciding what to do with the next two hours.

Less choice. Better choice.

That’s really the idea behind Pick Better Movies.

Streaming gave us access to almost everything.

But access isn’t the same as discovery.

And discovery isn’t the same as knowing whether something suits you.

Pick Better Movies is an experiment in giving up a little bit of choice in exchange for something I think may be more valuable:

confidence.

You still have the entire streaming universe available to you.

You just don’t have to search all of it yourself.

Because there are thousands of movies out there you’d probably love.

Finding them shouldn’t take longer than watching them.