(ABC 6 News) – How many times do you and your family sit down for an evening of TV and you spend more time searching for something than you do watching something? I’ll bet it’s pretty much every time.

Never before have we had more movies to choose from, right on our TV. Streaming services
offer thousands of movies to watch.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, Hulu, Max, and Paramount+ have
a total of 29,043 movies alone!!

But how do you find one? You can spend more time searching for a movie than watching a
movie. Here’s how to find just what you’re looking for.

For fun, we’ll try to find something in the horror genre for Halloween.

JustWatch

The JustWatch app is for iOS and Android devices. Here’s how it works. Select the streaming
services you subscribe to. Then add some of the free options like Pluto, Tubi, and FreeVee. The
app will show you everything those services have available and what you can watch.

Choices may still be overwhelming, so let’s narrow things down by choosing genres. We’ll pick
Horror that shows over 10,000 titles to pick from. Then sort them by popularity, trending, or year.
I prefer sorting by average IMDB rating or Rotten Tomatoes scores which puts the best movies
at the top of the search result.

If you have children, you can add a filter to find age appropriate scary movies with G, PG, or
PG-13 ratings. You can also preview the movie by watching the trailers, see the stars, and get a
link to the movie’s IMDB page.

JustWatch works not just on mobile devices, but computers and some smart TVs have
JustWatch apps. So does Amazon Fire Sticks. But it’s easier to search on phones and iPads.

And if you find a movie you want to see, you can use the phone as a remote to play it on a
connected TV.

My personal favorite feature is being able to bookmark a movie to watch later. When I run
across something while I search that I’d like to see, I add it to a personal Watch List. The next
time someone says “I don’t care, find something”, I can open the Watch List and pull up
something I’ve heard is pretty good or that I’ve just been wanting to watch.

JustWatch is a free app. A premium version is $2.50 a month that removes ads and comes with
a few more filters. For most people, the free version is all that you need if you don’t mind seeing
ads pop up while you search.