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If you’re a movie buff or TV lover (or both—let’s be serious), you know the pains of searching endlessly for the next great thing to watch. Whether you’re into documentaries, old television shows, or hidden gems that would never turn up on Netflix search, here are seven great tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
Find the best movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more.
Totally confused about what you watch tonight? Leanflix is a search engine built to help you find what you’re looking for. One of the co-founders, Zack Kanter, says, “Our goal is to build a reddit-like community for discovering and discussing movies and TV.” You can search by service, genre, year, score, language, country of production, and more.
The Leanflix team developed a rating algorithm based off of data from numerous sources, including: Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDB, and more. They are also experimenting with social features like user profiles, site-wide live chat, and commenting—so stay tuned for some of those.
Largest and best curated collection of documentaries.
If you are a fan of documentaries, this is a site you’re going to want to bookmark. The first thing you will think, upon visiting Documentary Addict for the first time, is, “I had no idea so many documentaries even existed.” There are over 5,000 different titles listed on this site, which is insane. For each one, you’ll typically find a preview video and a blurb describing the documentary.
You can sort the content in a bunch of different ways: “Best Documentaries,” random, or by category (e.g. comedy, conspiracy, environment, health, history, science, sports, and much more). You are sure to find something interesting here that you didn’t even know existed.
Bring back TV from your childhood.
So, this is basically the coolest site ever — particularly if you’re feeling nostalgic. Designed to look like an old school television screen, you turn it “on” by clicking the power button, and can flip through the channels by year or category.
You’ll find cartoons, commercials, game shows, soap operas, news, movies, music, trailers, kids shows, and more from the 1990s. My 90’s TV will send you straight down memory lane, wishing you could go back to the days when TRL and 90210 were your idea of a happy hour. 🙂
Ambient backlight synced to your TV or monitor.
Lightpack is the ultimate lighting device for your TV (and it’ll also work with your Mac or PC). The backdrop lighting animates your screen, giving anything you watch an extra pop.
One of the benefits of Lightpack is its ability to help compensate rapid fluctuations of room light. Apparently, it takes your eyes time to react to bright light, and then even more time to adjust to darker scenes. The muscles in your eyes are in constant tension when watching movies; and this device makes it a little easier for your eyes to adjust, which is pretty cool. If nothing else, you’ll find the added lighting aesthetically pleasing.
Browse top rated movies by genre and year.
If you’ve ever sat down to watch a movie and thought, “I feel like seeing an old-school comedy tonight,” or, “I want to check out a new political thriller,” Film Hunt will help you find what you’re looking for.
You can search for the best movies by category (e.g. action, horror, drama, comedy, mystery) and year (1990–2016). This is a fun way to look for new films that might be harder to find on regular movie service search engines.
Find hidden gems on Netflix.
We love Netflix as much as the next person, but sometimes, finding what you’re looking for can be a huge pain. FlickSurfer heals the pain point by allowing you to search in a more robust way. You can search by “Movies” or “TV Shows,” and then category — action, adventure, sci-fi, romance, drama, documentary, etc.
For each show or film, you can see what its average rating is between IMDB, Netflix, and Rotten Tomatoes. It’s similar in function to Leanflix, but has a different UI experience. Give both a try and see which one you like better.
Synchronize Netflix playback with friends remotely
Netflix Party is a Chrome extension for watching Netflix remotely with friends, e.g., for movie nights with that long-distance special someone. It synchronizes video playback and adds group chat. And it’s one of our favorite social cord cutter products. All you have to do to get started is:
We hope you found something in this article that helps you discover new movies and TV shows. But, don’t blame us when you fall into a movie marathon hole. 😉
Looking for more great cord-cutting TV apps? You can find the full collection on Product Hunt:
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