'Watching TV is so complicated now'

[The first 8 of the 65 titles on my IMDb watch list.]

The headline up top is a quote from reader Bubbub's comment earlier today.

In its entirety:

Watching TV is so complicated now.

I remember last November looking for "Yellowstone," it was on Hulu for what seems like 1 day then the next day it was not.

One day we could watch it, the next day it's on a service that we don't subscribe to.

Seems we'd have to be computer savvy to figure out where to watch something.

We search on our TV and we also have to search on Decider and/or JustWatch or even TVGuide.

So frustrating.

I agree 100%.

Just the other day I wanted to watch "A Common Man" starring Ben Kingsley; it had been on my Prime Video Watch List (aka "My Stuff" on other streamers) for weeks.

When I clicked on it, I got "This title is no longer available on Prime Video."

What? It was there the day before!

Movies on streaming services behave like quantum foam: they blink in and out of availability at random.

How I deal with this:

1. I keep watch lists on IMDb (Internet Movie Data Base) and JustWatch. IMDb is much better and rarely doesn't have a title in its data base. Having said that, I will note that many of my "to watch" titles on IMDb have been there for years.

2. Every couple months, when I'm feeling particularly energized, I go down each of these two lists title by title, manually entering each title in the Search boxes on AppleTV+, Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Peacock. This is VERY tedious and time consuming but fortunately I'm excellent at such tasks because I'm pathologically patient (something I've remarked on here in the past). Much to my delight, out of the 60-70 titles on my lists I find about 5 each time I do this, playing on one or more streamers. Sometimes titles on AppleTV+ which cost $ to rent there also appear on other streamers free.

[My watch list on JustWatch.]