The data layer

A newsroom can only cite what it can check. This is every source behind Watch, how each number is produced, what it does not cover, and how to reference it in a story.

Sources

Dataset	Source	Cadence	Coverage
Titles, artwork, cast	TMDB	Weekly	24,096 titles carrying any US offer — subscription, rent or buy
Streaming availability	JustWatch, via the TMDB API	Weekly	US only, 157 on-demand services
Charts	Netflix’s published Top 10 TSV	Weekly, Tuesdays	US films and TV, 10 each
Game schedules	ESPN public scoreboard	Daily	NFL and college football
Network → service carriage	Ours, hand-maintained	Reviewed 2026-08-27	29 networks, 16 carriers
Collections	Ours, computed	On re-cluster	114 clusters over the catalogue

Method

Availability. Every title is queried against TMDB’s watch/providers endpoint, which returns JustWatch’s US offer data. Provider names are canonicalised — TMDB returns Paramount+ under four spellings and Peacock, AMC+ and MGM+ under two each — then live-TV bundles are separated from on-demand libraries, because a channel line-up answers a different question than a library.

Change detection. The feed is a snapshot with no arrival or expiry dates, so change is derived by diffing consecutive refreshes into an event log. That is the only honest route to “new this week” from this source.

Collections. Each description is embedded into a 384-dimension space, clustered, and each cluster named by a language model. They are not genres; they are what the corpus actually grouped into.

Sports. ESPN supplies the game and its broadcaster, including local affiliates. We map that network to the services carrying it using our own table.

Known limits

US only. No other region is modelled.

No per-title prices. The availability source carries none, so no rental price is shown on a title page. Subscription prices used by the coverage calculator are each service’s published ad-supported list price, checked August 2026 — a different thing, and only shown where it can be verified.

Searches, not deep links. TMDB returns one JustWatch link per title, never one per provider, so provider buttons open that service’s search. A licensed feed is what turns them into true deep links.

Not a blackout checker. No public API exposes blackout-by-ZIP. Regional restrictions can still apply to a game we list, and a network with no carriage mapping reads “check provider” rather than being guessed at.

Catalogue floor. Titles below 30 TMDB votes are excluded, so very new or very obscure releases can be missing. Currently 6 of 20 charted titles are in the catalogue for that reason — the rest render with artwork but no page.

Weekly, not live. If a title left a service since the last refresh, we will still list it.

Machine-readable

The catalogue index that powers search and personalisation is a single JSON document, and the derived datasets are stable paths:

/data.json — services, collections and every title with its slug, year, type, services and artwork
/charts.json — the current Top 10 with source and week
/sports.json — upcoming games, networks, resolved services and carriers
/sitemap.xml — every indexable page

Advertising and neutrality

Two kinds of unit appear. House promotions for this product, and sponsored units carrying a real service’s public price and a link to its own signup page. Nothing invents a campaign or reuses a brand’s creative, no affiliate tag is attached, and no commercial relationship exists — they show what the inventory would look like.

Ordering is not for sale. Providers on a title page are sorted by tier — subscription, then rent, then buy — and alphabetically inside each tier. That order is computed before any sponsorship state is known and cannot be influenced by it. Sponsored placements only ever appear in visually distinct, labelled containers, never inside the availability list.

What is stored about you

Your selected services, your saved list, and a capped local log of what you searched and which titles you wanted but could not watch. All of it lives in your browser’s own storage, none of it is transmitted, and there is no account, cookie or third-party tracker. Clearing site data removes it entirely.

How to cite it

In a story: “According to Watch, which tracks US streaming availability across 157 on-demand services using JustWatch data via TMDB, Interstellar is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ as of the week of 27 August 2026.”

Short form: Source: Watch streaming availability database (JustWatch/TMDB), retrieved 2026-08-27.

Always cite the retrieval date. Availability changes constantly, and a claim about where something streams is only true as of a date.