Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Facebook, Amazon, and others have divvied up available entertainment with exclusive deals that only hurt the consumer. The A.V. Club has discussed the issues of separate competing on-demand services many times, from the Netflix price hike to Criterion moving to Hulu Plus to Disney and ABC putting their libraries on Amazon and Netflix.
Now there’s a website that tries to make sense of it all. Can I Stream It? does all of the hard work for you, taking a movie title and telling you all of the places online where it can be purchased or rented, physically and digitally, or streamed instantly. Erik Davis from Movies.com called it “sort of like Kayak for movies,” which is pretty accurate. The site can help figure out which of the cavalcade of streaming sites would be the right fit to subscribe to, but you’d have to be a subscriber to multiple services for Can I Stream It? to really help. Still, it makes the headache of checking the availability of a particular movie much more manageable. Enjoy it while you can, before the powers-that-be figure out a way to make you pay for even attempting to find out what they have in stock in comparison to their competitors.