- JustWatch TV debuts with 30 content partners in 12 markets
- It offers AVOD, TVOD and a $3.99 per month SVOD option
- The service hopes to grow to 100 million global users in the coming years
- JustWatch aims to be a hub of discovery, both for consumers and studios and streamers
- The effort feeds a circular economy between the JustWatch Guide, JustWatch TV, and JustWatch Media
JustWatch, the company known for its streaming guide that helps upwards of 50 million users track and find where to watch content, has officially launched its own streaming service, JustWatch TV, across 12 markets globally.
It’s coming out of the gate strong with 30 content partners at launch and a collection of TV and movies offered across AVOD, TVOD and a low-cost, $3.99 per month ad-free SVOD option.
Not only will JustWatch TV be a place to both find and watch content, but it also aims to serve as a discovery destination to bring attention to third-party streaming services, content partners and their titles.
To get the scoop for StreamTV Insiders, we sat down with JustWatch’s Quentin Carbonell, the former HBO Max executive who joined the company in December in the newly created role SVP of Global Content Acquisitions and Strategy and helped spearhead the content side of the launch, to discuss strategy and more details around the new service.
He sees JustWatch TV as a business in its own right but described a so-called circular economy that also stands to support and benefit the company’s media services arm and guide and is part of a larger vision to become a content discovery hub and driver – rather than competitor – for the streaming ecosystem overall.
More on that aspect in a bit, but first, what’s the JustWatch TV streamer coming to market with at launch?
JustWatch expands streaming Guide into streaming service
Founded in 2014, JustWatch is known for its streaming guide, which already serves between 50-60 million unique monthly users globally.
The guide lists viewing options for more than 500,000 movies and TV shows across more than 1,500 streaming services worldwide and provides where-to-watch data and streaming charts to over 1,400 partner websites and apps. Its guide is used to power LetterBox and is often behind the top results Google displays when people search for where to find content.
It’s leveraging that position and base, with a purview of what content viewers are searching, tracking and watching across streaming services (and where that content lives), to launch its own streaming service within the existing JustWatch app.
The JustWatch app and new streaming service is available on mobile for iOS and Android and via CTV with the app downloadable on Apple TV, Roku, Android TV and LG TV devices, as well as the web.
The 12 initial launch markets include the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.
With plans initially announced in September, newly named content partners at launch include Cineverse in the US, Leonine Studios in Germany, SND in France, and Altitude in the UK. They join previously announced partners Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media.
Carbonell declined to share the exact number of titles or hours JustWatch TV will have at launch but said the service will debut with a curated bouquet offering “a few hundred titles across the board” between AVOD and TVOD options, with the intent to rotate and refresh titles regularly.
Model-wise, JustWatch TV has three options to serve up TV series and movie titles to viewers.
There will be a free, ad-supported video on-demand (AVOD) tier and initially the option to rent TV shows and movies via transactional video on-demand (TVOD), before later gradually rolling out support for purchases as well.
Notably, it also offers an ad-free SVOD option, dubbed JustWatch TV Plus, priced at $3.99 per month.
For now, the paid option won’t have additional titles beyond what JustWatch offers for AVOD and TVOD but will offer a large part of the selection found there and is meant to target people that want low-cost viewing without ads.
“We want to really talk to our audience in the best ways possible and give them different options,” Carbonell told us.
Roku has seen success with its low-cost ad-free Howdy SVOD and Carbonell also expressed curiosity both personally and from content partners to explore and see the appetite for this type of ad-free offering.
As for users, JustWatch already counts a sizable base and has ambitions to double that via the new streaming service.
“We want to grow this to 100 million [monthly users] in the years to come,” Carbonell told StreamTV Insiders, while declining to put a more specific deadline or timeline on the target.
Strong response from content partners
When Carbonell was hired at JustWatch in December he was tasked with an ambitious endeavor: Launching a new global streaming service in less than a year.
“It has been an absolute crazy adventure to launch this thing in such a short amount of time,” said Carbonell, who in addition to HBO Max also counts prior content acquisition leadership experience at MUBI and FilmStruck.
But the content acquisition exec met the task handily, saying, the response from content partners “has been amazing” and “I’m definitely very happy with the results.”
Up for the challenge indeed, having secured 30 content partners and some major names in in just the past 10 months and additional deals being actively signed, with “many more” in the pipe coming soon.
Part of that he credits to the JustWatch brand, which has been around for more than a decade. As such, studio and streaming professionals are familiar with it, the exec noted, both for their own personal use to see where content travels across the ecosystem, as well as for professional media and creative services the company offers.
With a dozen markets lined up, the volume and types of content available at launch vary by territory, with a somewhat more extensive lineup offered in the U.S., where Carbonell acknowledged he went “all in.”
In Europe, lineups will be very different from one territory to another, and he noted going deep into local partners in international markets, such as Leonine in Germany and SND France, for example.
The paid option’s content lineup will also vary country by country.
The new streamer aims to serve a curated variety of programming , spanning U.S., international classic movies to catering to affinities for Japanese content “that’s quite strong” on JustWatch in many territories.
Initially, titles are non-exclusive although some can only be found on JustWatch TV for free, and exclusive windows could be carved out in time.
Positioned for hub of content discovery, attention
Carbonell has built his strategy around this next phase of the business to “catalyze the essence of what JustWatch is” – ie: a recommendation engine and a way to connect people to content.
And that goes to both consumers looking for something to watch, as well as content owners that might have vast libraries and want more visibility for titles.
In a fragmented streaming TV landscape, content and viewing is split across numerous platforms and services, while specific titles often cycling among different streamers – making knowing what’s available and where to watch it a challenge.
Earlier Gracenote data found it takes people in the U.S. an average of 12 minutes to land on something to watch – so not an ideal viewing experience.
JustWatch helps ease this struggle with the ability for users to select the streaming services they subscribe to, find hidden gems, receive personalized recommendations from across services and see the correct platform for where to view content -– including now on its own JustWatch TV.
But importantly, content discovery isn’t a consumer challenge only. On a similar but slightly different front, in this environment, streamers, studios, media companies and owners of content also face challenges of breaking through the noise and ensuring their titles are visible or discoverable by audiences and not buried deep within a user interface.
This is where the JustWatch Guide, JustWatch TV and the JustWatch Media unit can help feed into and support one another.
‘Circular economy’ aims
Asked by StreamTV Insider whether the goal and belief is for JustWatch TV to be a standalone, profitable business, Carbonell affirmed it is trying to build a self-sustaining streaming service – but one that ties into and helps support the company’s other arms of business services, such as JustWatch Media.
JustWatch Media uses consumer data and insights gleaned from the streaming guide to help studios, distributors, streaming services and media agencies with their own marketing efforts, such as analyzing demographics for specific genres or titles, and help deliver targeted digital content marketing campaigns across YouTube, Meta, TikTok and other platforms.
Now that service stands to be more robust as JustWatch TV is poised to get first-party data not only on what TV shows and films people are searching and tracking, but actual viewing and consumption data.
And while feeding each other in a fortuitous cycle, Carbonell emphasized the three arms will each be self-sustaining as well.
“It’s really going to be a circular economy,” he said, where the plan is to support that element of discovery or discoverability overall.
“You can watch a title on JustWatch and then go explore something else on Tubi,” for example, Carbonell said.
Its goal to add another 40 million monthly users in the years ahead is all about growing the overall pie, he said, and is just as much for the benefit of JustWatch TV service as it is for content and streaming service partners.
Helping to power the circular economy trio of guide, streaming service and media services, is JustWatch’s ability to quickly build accurate user profiles.
Quickly building more accurate user profiles
One area JustWatch benefits from and has strength in is the ability to aggregate content preferences, interests and title momentum from across the streaming ecosystem.
In addition to selecting their existing subscriptions, users of JustWatct can add titles they want to see or have watched and click on titles across the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Apple and many others. With this position and view, JustWatch can quickly build more accurate user profiles that offer a more holistic picture of users’ content preferences.
Typically, this can be a challenge for streamers, Carbonell explained, as even the most powerful platforms, like Netflix, are simply bound by time.
In contrast, a music platform like Spotify, for example, could quickly build a user profile after one listened to several songs. However, on streaming it would take viewers several hours (likely across multiple days) to get through one series before moving onto the next or multiple movies – meaning it takes longer to build a robust viewing preference profile.
And even then, streamers might have visibility into their own platform, but it’s likely an incomplete picture as most consumers use multiple services to watch TV and they might not know what that person is watching or interested in across other environments.
“What we can really do is to combine all of this when people redirect themselves to different platforms, tell us what they like, tell us what they watched, and build a much more accurate profile.”
JustWatch’s Guide underlies the profiles which in turn help enhance the personalized recommendations and discovery engine – both for consumers and content or streaming service partners.
And it’s an aspect that will only be further bolstered by first-party viewing data with JustWatch TV.
“We can recommend to them even better other titles throughout this constellation of services, even now, including JustWatch and vice versa,” he explained. “We do believe that this is the best way forward to help people to find titles but also surprise themselves with new things they've never heard about potentially.”
Accent on ‘hidden gems’, reviving library titles
Part of the circular economy vision stems from JustWatch’s focus helping people find and content owners surface hidden gems in the vast sea of content options.
Carbonell described how the service is being built in a way that puts an accent on helping viewers find hard-to-find titles or so-called unstreamables.
He explained that many content owners are often surprised to learn there’s appetite for hidden or older titles in their library, which is something the JustWatch guide and now JustWatch TV has visibility into.
“So many of our partners have such an incredible production of originals, [but] some of them now are maybe a bit forgotten and we could revive some of those,” adding the aim is to make all boats rise.
Supporting studios and streamers’ content discovery, marketing
For example, if a studio is trying to launch a film they might go to JustWatch to find data on all fans of the filmmaker and how other movies did on the platform. With people now watching content on JustWatch TV, beyond just flagging interest or searching them, the data stands to be even more robust and useful for studios and streamers.
Streaming partners could also advertise against their own catalog or new theatrical releases within the JustWatch TV app.
Here, Carbonell sees the app as something that can help drive more people to theaters, the living room screen or elsewhere for viewing, all from one place.
Potential for sampling, ingesting content
With that in mind, sampling content on one streamer before being pushed to another to finish a season, watch the latest or head to theaters for a new premiere, has been a tactic some streamers and studios have been employing as they seek to bring attention to titles in different environments.
There are plenty, but in a recent example, Lionsgate tapped Versant’s Fandango to stream the Hunger Games films for free and offer a place to buy tickets ahead of the anticipated upcoming theatrical release of the next film in the franchise. Meanwhile, some providers in certain markets have ingested branding and content from others into their own apps (like TF1 with Netflix in France for example, HBO Max onboarding partners like AMC, or more recently TV5MONDE on Prime Video in France and Germany).
Content sampling or ingestion isn’t part of the initial JustWatch TV launch but could be down the line.
“This is something we're very excited about, and this is something that I really want to work on with partners,” Carbonell told us.
Algorithms are finite, curation is key for discovery
JustWatch also wants to stay true to its consumer mission of helping people get to the content they want to watch quickly and discover new titles they might not have known about.
Although data is vital to the effort, one lesson Carbonell has retained from his time at HBO Max and other streamers, is that when it comes to surfacing, recommending and driving viewers to content, curation is key.
“Curation makes such a huge difference and everyone does it…in different ways,” he noted.
The streaming executive believes this is an area where the company excels and JustWatch TV will incorporate human curation and editorial fan-driven efforts to promote and push content and support discovery, including articles and recommendations. This stands to make the content it surfaces more interesting for consumers and more dynamic.
“Because algorithms are finite and there are many ways to push some great titles that we have based on cast, genre and momentum,” he said. “This is a combination of indeed a decade of data that we’ve accumulated, but also a lot of great people working within the team.”
It’s also getting users overall involved in the process by seeing what they want to engage with and even offering features that allow user feedback on content they would like to see on the service.
“We can really just create an environment that would also support studios and distributors in different ways to surface their content,” he said of JustWatch TV.
Article updated to remove an earlier reference to availability of the JustWatch app on Fire TV as it is not yet live on that platform.