Improvement ideas: let the user set their country. If I live in Germany, and I don't want to bother with VPN, knowing that a TV show is available in Argentina and 30 other countries is not important.
Also, I don't think this takes care of the case where some seasons of a show is available but not the others. Maybe that's also the reason for false negatives in some cases (others mentioned this).
Another thing: be able to search by subtitles and audio. In our household, we speak three languages, and I can't watch shows in 2 out of 3 with the standard location. It's also great for people learning languages (common VPN pitch).
Overall, great stuff!
The mobile view's information density is very low, I can see 1.7 tiles, so I always need to scroll.
Tapping on the tiles doesn't do anything apart from changing the background.
Some more preset selections would be nice like "Sitcom".
Recommendations based on the selected movie would be also great, for example when I'm watching HIMYM, I'd not mind seeing where Friends is available (it's basically the same jokes but a decade apart with different actors).
Really does seem to be the case. I just tried with The Omen and was given a list of countries. Next to the US was an ad to "Stream with NordVPN", suggesting that's the only way to view it here. However, I clicked the Hulu button, and it said US without the ad. Sure enough, I checked Hulu itself, and it's there—no VPN required.
The ad placement is confusing. Hopefully it's not intentional. JustWatch may not be as clean and may have ads of its own, but its entry for the same movie has zero confusion.
Along the same lines to your suggestion (thus, piggybacking): A filter based on principal language of the movie[s].
For example, if I want to discover new movies in German, Swedish, Norwegian, etc., I have to know the name, first, for the search operation; otherwise, I just movies with the term in the title (e.g.: Svenska returns Svenska tv-historier, Svenska fall, Svenska Hollywoodfruar, Barncancergalan - Det Svenska humorpriset, Svenska Truckers, and Svenska Powerkvinnor).
Which leads me to a suggestion, based on that:
If there's no steam available, don't return the result in the search[1]. The whole intent of the site to show "where to stream" but if there's no stream, returning a result with the message 'Sorry, we couldn't find any streaming information.' is a bit of a false positive -- in a "we have it but we don't" sense.
I use PotonVPN since a while and it works like a charm.
A note though, since some years now using a VPN is not really the panacea for streaming country restricted movies, as more and more the deciding factor is the originating country of your credit card.
That's an extremely valid piece of feedback and something I'm planning to spend more time clarifying on the platform so that people know how to navigate those and similar issues. There are cases where it's not only the credit card that's a deciding factor, but sometimes even the country from which you were creating your account (e.g. Prime Video).
If you only need a single country, nothing beats a tiny VPS company based there. The kind of place where setting the VPS up takes a few hours because an employee has to do it manually. Those companies are usually small enough to escape the notice of streaming giants.
A lot of streaming services have wised up to dynamic IP ranges and will kick you off pretty quick. I use a service with a dedicated residential IP in my target country and that’s worked flawlessly for over 5 years.
Or use GeoIP to assume a default country, but allow the user to change their country or clear the country filter. MaxMind has a free offline GeoIP database that’s good.
If the developer wants to keep the full country list, they could move the GeoIP identified country to the top of the list and/or highlight it for easy access.
Also, I don't think this takes care of the case where some seasons of a show is available but not the others. Maybe that's also the reason for false negatives in some cases (others mentioned this).
Another thing: be able to search by subtitles and audio. In our household, we speak three languages, and I can't watch shows in 2 out of 3 with the standard location. It's also great for people learning languages (common VPN pitch).
Overall, great stuff! The mobile view's information density is very low, I can see 1.7 tiles, so I always need to scroll.
Tapping on the tiles doesn't do anything apart from changing the background.
Some more preset selections would be nice like "Sitcom".
Recommendations based on the selected movie would be also great, for example when I'm watching HIMYM, I'd not mind seeing where Friends is available (it's basically the same jokes but a decade apart with different actors).