Watchily makes finding streaming movies and TV shows incredibly easy

Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, posits that more choices make things inherently less satisfying for us. While it’s hard to see things that way, stepping back from a situation makes it clear that Schwartz (at least in part) is very right.

Now here’s a twist – let’s take Schwartz’s work in psychology and apply it to online video. With more choices being thrown at us all the time, it’s increasingly frustrating and difficult to find who has what, how much it will cost and where the best options are.

That’s exactly what Watchily lets you do. Billing itself as “the best way to watch”, the service acts as a search engine for online, streaming video. Want to know which option presently has the show that you want? Just drop the title into Watchily and check the results. Your choice just became a lot easier.

It’s worth noting that Watchily is only searching for legal options. So you’ll get results from Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu and the like. Sorry, pirating friends, you’ll have to find your booty elsewhere.

With the ability to filter by price, length, store, rating and genre, narrowing down some otherwise-obtuse results gets a bit easier. The results, however, are still not perfect. As you can see above, Top Gun gives me the result for the movie at the top, which is indeed what I wanted. Searching for another piece of classic military film making, Navy Seals, gives far less stellar returns that required me to do a little bit more filtering.

At any rate, it makes my first world problems just a bit easier to deal with, and it’s free. Those are two factors that I can easily respect, even if I did have to dig deep to get my dose of Charlie Sheen with a rocket launcher.

➤ Watchily