An open letter to the streaming services

This site exists because you do not do two things that you could do easily, and that would cost you almost nothing. Here they are.

1. Offer a franchise as a release-order playlist

Where you hold all of a franchise, or most of it, let somebody watch it in the order it came out.

Disney+ has Star Wars and it has the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Paramount+ has essentially all of Star Trek. Between you, you hold nearly every franchise on this site. And in every case what you offer is a shelf: here are eleven separate programmes and fourteen separate films, arrange them yourself.

That is a worse product than you already have the parts for. The value of a franchise is in the places it crosses over with itself, and those crossings were written to be seen in the order they came out. Watched down one series at a time, a two-part event staged across two shows arrives with its halves weeks apart and neither half makes sense. A character turns up in one programme already changed by something the viewer has not been shown yet.

You are not being asked to make anything. The dates are a matter of record, and I have spent a long time proving they can be established: thirty-seven franchises and fifteen thousand entries, ordered to the day and, where two things went out the same night, to the slot. This is a sort order. You already know the release date of everything you hold.

And it is a retention argument, not a favour. A franchise in the right order is a hundred and fifty hours of a reason to stay subscribed. A shelf of unrelated titles is a browsing session that ends in nothing being watched.

2. Let people build and share playlists across films and episodes

This one is for the platforms where people buy things rather than rent access to them — Apple, Amazon, and the rest.

You have sold somebody the films and the series. They own them. They still cannot put them in one list and press play, and they certainly cannot hand that list to a friend. Music has had this since the CD burner. There is no technical reason a library of video should be harder to order than a library of songs.

It also solves the problem the first ask cannot. No single service holds a whole franchise, because rights are split and re-split constantly — which means a viewer-built list that spans what they actually own is the only version of this that survives contact with the industry. Give people the tool and they will do the curation you are not doing.

What this page used to say

For a long time this page promised a petition you could sign, and no petition ever appeared. Rather than leave that standing, here is the honest version: there is no petition, and I am not convinced one would move anybody. What is here instead is the argument, in public, where it can be pointed at.

If you work at one of these companies and this is more useful to you as a specification than as a complaint, that is the best possible outcome — the ordering is all on this site and you are welcome to it. If you are a viewer who agrees, the feedback form reaches me, and a note saying which franchise you wanted to watch and could not is worth more than a signature.

— Matt Large, who makes FROO