I use Trakt primarily to find popular Movies and TV shows that are available across the range of streaming services I already pay for. The trending and popular sections under Movies and Shows are perfect for me, as they can filter out recent shows and movies that I’ve already seen or hidden, but the results are littered with movies and shows that I can’t watch because they are only available for purchase, and not included in the streaming service of my favorited platforms.
Is there a way I can filter out movies and shows that are only available on my favorite services with a purchase? Without this, I can’t see a way to use Trakt to find the shows and movies that I can watch now. It sounds like a little thing, but its ruining my ability to use the app effectively and I’m considering cancelling my subscription to Trakt as its not helping me do the one thing I was willing to pay for.
Hey there! Since you’re VIP, if you’ve selected your favorite streaming services in your account settings, there’s also a settings box for “only favorites”, which will display icons if the item is streaming on your favorite services.
For example, this screenshot is of the trending page. The Life List has the icon because it’s available to stream on one of my streaming services (Netflix), but Mickey 17 and The Monkey aren’t available to stream yet, so they don’t have the icon.
Actually, this setting doesn’t seem to filter out movies that are only available on my favorited platforms for purchase, so this isn’t useful for me to figure out what I can watch NOW included in my favorite subscriptions. I don’t want to see movies as playable that just happen to be purchasable from the same platform. I know its inadvertant, but this feels like paying for advertising.
Inlining purchasable content with subscriber content is an upsell technique from those platforms.
Cutting through the BS of the streaming services is your core value proposition for VIP. I hope you guys are taking this seriously, though I think I also understand the performance implications hinted at (not being able to build a cache when availability may differ in purchase/free based on regionality). Almost looks like the calculation is being done client side on the web app, as sometimes I see the play now button flicker and dissapear.
Anyways, thanks for letting me vent and providing me the best answer you have. Have a good day!
It’s not upsell or advertising. That’s just how the data comes in from JustWatch (and their API). This isn’t something that Trakt is doing to try and get you to purchase anything. It’s simply showing you your viewing options. Whether that’s free or paid…you still have the option to view the show/movie based on your favorited options.
I doubt the streaming services don’t mind, but I also highly doubt they care that Trakt provides this information. I don’t think Trakt gets a dime from someone that might purchase a show/movie going through that JustWatch information.
There are a lot of reasons why this data could be showing up in the results in a way it can’t be filtered.
There could be an agreement between the data provider and the streaming platforms that ‘purchasable’ content won’t be filtered out and that they won’t add meta data to make it easy to filter out
There could be technical challenges from Trakt (related to regionality) that would stop them from effectively making it filterable without breaking their scalability and pagination
Pessimistically there might be an agreement between Trakt and the streaming platforms to include purchasable content and not allow them to be easily filtered out. I wouldn’t expect Trakt support to admit to this if it existed, instead they would give simple excuses as exists in this thread.
As a consumer of Trakt VIP…I don’t actually care about the specific reason. The inclusion of purchasable content inline with streamable / included content is ruining my ability to use the service and will impact my renew decisions in the future.
Not the case, there is nothing behind the scenes influence what links we display or don’t display.
Yes, we currently have a technical limitation, which is why there isn’t a filter for cost vs. no cost. All the availability is cached, and we filter against that cache. The cache only has the country + streaming service, but nothing related to cost information. It will require rethinking how that data is cached and not a small undertaking since a ton of watch now features are built around that cached data.
icons if the item is streaming on your favorite services.
