While we haven’t quite reinvented the TV business of old, it’s hard to look at the rising costs of streaming services or the growing number of services to choose from, and not feel like something has gone wrong. The ballooning costs and complications of watching your favorite show have gotten so bad that there are evenstreaming bundlesthat give you multiple services for a lower price, not unlike an old school cable subscription.
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Wrangling your streaming services in 2024
“I noticed how much I was spending for the subscriptions, and it had only been a month, and it’s like ‘okay, I’m spending almost £100 on these things, so there must be something I can do to decrease the cost,'” Matteo Comisso, the creator of Seasons at MYV Studios, tells me over Zoom. Comisso claims he wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel with an app that managed and tracked streaming subscriptions, there just really wasn’t anything like it out there.
“I think the idea was to cover the questions about, ‘where can I find the content and when can I watch it?,'” Comisso says. “But also, ‘how can I spend the least amount of money as possible to optimize all these things?’” Seasons does all three, and without AI, Comisso took care to note. “The algorithm behind the scenes, it’s becoming a monster on its own. But it does the heavy lifting…it’s not really dependent on AI or anything.”
Comisso claims he wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel with an app that managed and tracked streaming subscriptions, there just really wasn’t anything like it out there.
The algorithm at the heart of Seasons can approach taming your subscriptions in one of three ways. A balanced approach that tries to keep you on top of your shows while still saving money, a streaming-focused approach that prioritizes letting you see all your shows over worrying about subscriptions, and a cost-saving approach that’s willing to delay watching a show to focus on taming subscription costs. Comisso suggests how the algorithm performs will improve over time as he and his team address some “edge cases” that can skew recommendations. A version of the app for Android is also in the works.
Where Comisso and his team source the streaming service, information may also improve performance. Currently, Seasons’ catalog of shows is pulled from The Movie Database (TMDB) API, which uses metadata from JustWatch, a popular service for checking where a given piece of media is available to stream. The main problem with it is it often takes 24 hours for a new show to appear, leaving Seasons a little out of date. “We’re also in talks with other bigger, I would say, more reliable [providers] in terms of speed,” Comisso says. There are more than a few ways Seasons could improve in the next few weeks and months.
How Seasons works
There’s a lot of information to poke through in Seasons, but the most striking to me is in the “My Seasons” home tab. At the top of the page is a simple number; specifically, a price. It’s the cost per day of your streaming habit. I’ve used finance and savings apps before, but it’s rare to be presented with the cost of your passion, nay, obsession with media so plainly. And mine was only a few cents per day! But it’s easy to see how if you didn’t cancel your streaming services, those cents could add up over time.
An End to Streaming Fatigue
