How to Find Where Your Favorite Movie Is Streaming

The Streaming Wars are well underway. Apple, NBC, HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Disney and countless others are all vying for our attention and battling over exclusivity rights for our favorite shows and movies. So how do you figure out what is streaming where, when and for how long? In the video above, I go over some ways to track down streams of your favorite shows and movies.

Just Google it

At the risk of sounding cheeky, just googling the name of the show or movie you’re looking for is often the fastest way to figure out where to stream it. Google’s algorithm usually does a good job of surfacing where you can rent, buy or stream a piece of content. Finding out Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” is available to stream on Hulu was a cakewalk.

However, not all Google search results are made equal: When I searched for the massively popular anime “My Hero Academia,” the “Available on” widget pictured above didn’t appear. Searching “how to watch My Hero Academia” did make the widget appear, but the information wasn’t complete; Crunchyroll and Funimation, two of the most popular anime streaming services, didn’t even show up.

JustWatch or Reelgood

A better way to find your favorite content is to use dedicated sites like JustWatch or Reelgood. Both of these sites track and catalog where movies and TV shows are available to buy, rent or stream. You can make an account with either service and limit the search results to just the services you subscribe to. Both also offer mobile apps.

Finding “Spider-Man” and “My Hero Academia” was simple on both sites, and both showed me a number of ways I could watch them. However, the data for “My Hero…” seemed out of date on JustWatch. It showed just two seasons of the show available to stream on Hulu and Funimation, but I know that’s untrue. I just finished watching Season 4 a couple of weeks ago.

Of the two, Reelgood is my personal favorite. The interface is much sleeker than JustWatch, the data appears more up-to-date (all 4 seasons of My Hero Academia properly cataloged), and I liked how I could keep track of shows I’d already seen or was interested in checking out.