By the time it takes you to sift through the Netflix library and decide what to watch, you could be three quarters the way through an episode of The Man in the High Castle (hint: watch this show - amazing). There’s too much content to look at and too few ways of helping us to decide what to watch.

IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic use aggregated user ratings to help us make decisions, if only Netflix and other streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Hulu tried to incorporate these powerful tools. Well now there is.

Cinesift is a movie database that combines Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Letterbox and Metacritic ratings with Netflix and Amazon Prime content and also includes regional availability. 

Cinesift is relatively new and offers an incredibly valuable resource for the end user. Not only that, but its popularity will, over time, prove to Netflix and Amazon Prime the importance of a great user experience. What use is creating content, if people can't decide what to watch?

Over time Cinesift will iron out the bugs and user feedback applied.

A couple of ideas that we think would work well include:

Build a content recommendations filter based on other user’s lists e.g. most favourited, most watched

Ability to add movies to watchlists and be notified when they become available through different formats e.g. The Martian is only available through DVD, inform me when it can be streamed.

Get rid of the infinit scrolling page. This technique makes it hard for the user to know where they are on the page

Include foreign language films

Props go to Reddit user yombat who built the website; we hope they won't be punished by Netflix, Amazon, IMDB etc, and instead are recognised for creating a valuable addition to our binge watching requirements, this could come in the form of a kick ass job or an offer they can’t refuse!

Check Cinesift out for yourself here.