How Watchworthy Works
Photo: Watchworthy
If you’ve been living under a rock — or, more specifically, a rock that doesn’t have internet access — then you haven’t heard the news from some of the biggest publications in tech and entertainment that our Watchworthy app just launched. In just 30 seconds, Watchworthy can learn enough about your taste to deliver personalized recommendations for what to watch next.
But if you have heard the news about Watchworthy, you may still have questions — questions like, “how does it work,” “how do I use it,” or, “how are Watchworthy and Ranker connected?” This blog post will explain a little more about how we designed this app, and why we think it’s going to help you stop scrolling through an endless list of shows every night… only to end up watching The Office again. We love The Office too, but there are over 58,000 streaming shows available today — we’ll help you find what’s worthy of your free time.
Why We Made Watchworthy
TV fans today have more stuff to watch than they know what to do with. There’s so much new content out there to stream that it’s impossible to even be aware of every show currently on the air, let alone watch all of them. Some 170 million U.S. users subscribe to OTT services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, and more recently, Disney+ and AppleTV+. You know what the end result is because you’re probably dealing with it in your living room every night: endless scrolling through a list of shows you’ve never heard of or even worse, clicking in and out of every streaming service you have looking at each service’s programming.
We made Watchworthy to help people take advantage of this new Golden Age of Peak TV. It looks across all the different apps, streaming services, and channels out there for the content that’s most likely to be just right for you, then tells you where you can find it. These days, there’s truly something new on TV out there for everyone: Watchworthy is here to help you find it and aggregate it into one centralized Watchlist.
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How to Use it
After you download the free app from the iOS App Store, Watchworthy will present you with TV shows and ask you to swipe right on the shows you like, swipe left on the ones you don’t like, and swipe up on shows you’re not sure about. After just thirty seconds of swiping, the app will give you TV recommendations targeted specifically at you based on your responses. Each show on the list of recommendations will feature a “worthy” score that indicates just how probable it is that you’ll love it.
Click on the plus sign to add recommendations to your Watchlist. If you’ve seen the shows we recommend, you can “like” or “dislike” them, helping the app to continue learning about your preferences. You can also set your services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.) on the app and refine your results to only get shows that you have access to. Once you’ve selected a show you want to watch, you can either start watching it directly from your device or screencast it to your TV. We’ll be adding movie recommendations to the app later on this year, as well as the ability to have your Watchlist on a smart TV, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast, as well as an Android app.
How Ranker Is Involved
How does Watchworthy know what shows you’ll fall in love with? We may not know you personally, but we do know what Ranker TV fans love.
There are over 50,000 votable lists about entertainment on Ranker.com — our data scientists have found millions of correlations in how people vote on those different lists. Some of those correlations aren’t so surprising: for example, we’ve found that people who vote up Ozark are more likely to also vote up other gritty crime dramas like Mindhunter and Bosch. But some correlations might not be so obvious. You probably wouldn’t have guessed that Ozark fans are ALSO drawn to shows about breaking the glass ceiling, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Glow!
Watchworthy takes all these correlations and uses them to predict what shows are just right for you — not the shows that one TV critic likes or the shows that streaming services are trying to promote, but the shows that are actually most likely to be worthy of your precious time.
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