Berlin-based company JustWatch launched in South Africa this week and already has 10 000 local users.
JustWatch is a streaming search engine that helps users find where movies and TV shows are available online to watch legally.
The service is already available in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, and has over five million users worldwide.
"JustWatch works by aggregating the offers of the most important streaming providers per country by automatically crawling their catalogues, or via a direct feed, or API at least once a day," says David Croy'e, one of the founders and CEO of JustWatch.
"We then aggregate all this data and match it together, so that our users can filter by genres, release year, ratings, price, streaming providers, etc, and search across all providers at once."
At the moment, the service searches Netflix, ShowMax, DSTV's BoxOffice, iTunes and Mubi in South Africa ? with Google Play to follow soon.
"JustWatch helps to compare different services like Netflix or ShowMax, to see which provider has the content you like more, or if it makes sense to sign up with both," says Croy'e. He believes in this example it would be a good idea for TV show junkies to use both services, "because the overlap of their catalogues is pretty small".
JustWatch was initially launched this time last year in the US, Germany and Brazil. Croy'e says the idea for a streaming search engine came about because he was using a lot of different streaming providers and sources to watch content online. "It was a pain to always use up to five Web sites to search if a movie is included in a subscription service already, or where I can get the best price to rent, or buy it.
"So we built the service for ourselves, and the business model idea came from my performance marketing background," says Croy'e.
The service is free to use and requires no subscription or login; however, users will need a subscription to the particular service if they want to view content. JustWatch makes money through affiliate marketing and commission from the streaming services for new subscribers and sales.
However, Croy'e says the main business model involves helping movie studios promote their new releases to the right audience. "We learn from our user data what people like, and how and where they buy it, so we have a lot more insights to run mobile video campaigns for our clients."
SA is the first African country to receive the service. "South Africa's infrastructure and online penetration has been growing so fast in the last years that streaming is working now better and better," says Croy'e. "Also the competition between Netflix and Naspers and other local players makes JustWatch a transparent service for where to find content."
An estimated one million South African households have the bandwidth speed to stream videos, as was reported last year, but this number is expected to swell in coming years as fibre-optic Internet providers race to roll out new services.
Faster Internet speeds globally are expected to increase VOD subscribers to 200 million by 2020, from around 83 million last year, according to statistics portal Statista.
Last year, Naspers launched streaming service ShowMax at R99 a month.
International VOD service, Netflix, launched in South Africa at the beginning of this year for R126 a month. A month later, Times Media Group's VOD service, VIDI, shut down after less than two years in the space.
Other smaller VOD players in South Africa include MTN's VU, OnTapTV and Future TV. These services are not available on the JustWatch search engine yet.
JustWatch is free to use and available on the Web, or as an Android or iOS app. Croy'e says the company plans to be available in 20 countries by the end of this year.
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