The JustWatch Group, whose app tells more than 50 million people a month where films and series can be found online, will start offering them directly from October. The Berlin-based company said on September 15, 2026, at TIFF: The Market in Toronto, that JustWatch TV will sit inside its existing apps and website in 12 countries and combine free ad-supported viewing, paid rentals and an ad-free subscription option, with Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media among its first content suppliers.

In Short

JustWatch, an app millions of people check to find out which service is showing a film, is going to start showing films itself. That matters because a company that has spent a decade pointing viewers towards Netflix, Prime Video and hundreds of other services will now compete with some of them for viewing time, and it will sell advertising in the process. From October, people using JustWatch in 12 countries will be able to watch some titles free with ads, rent newer ones, or pay for an ad-free option without leaving the app.

Three ways to watch, one app

According to the JustWatch Group, JustWatch TV will offer free ad-supported viewing, transactional rentals and an ad-free option sold on a subscription basis. The company's description of the new division adds some texture. The newest films will be available on premium and transactional video on demand, the early-release and pay-per-title windows known in the trade as PVOD and TVOD. A free library funded by advertising, or AVOD, will sit alongside them, together with a catalogue of ad-free films and series that the company describes as growing. The company's own subheading frames the whole product as an AVOD and TVOD destination, which leaves the subscription tier as the least documented of the three.

The service does not arrive as a separate app. According to the company, JustWatch TV is integrated directly into the existing JustWatch apps and website, so users move from browsing to watching without switching platform or creating a new account. It will be made available to all existing JustWatch users in the launch markets, and a standalone address, justwatch.tv, is listed as well.

The Wikipedia entry on JustWatch, last edited on August 16, 2026, lists the apps on Amazon Fire TV, Android, Android TV, iOS, Apple TV and the web, in 36 languages. Whether playback will work on each of those from the first day is not stated.

Much was left out. No rental price, subscription price, exact launch date, catalogue size, advertising load or advertising sales arrangement has been disclosed by the company. The company refers only to a launch next month, which, from a September 15 dateline, means October.

Twelve countries out of 140

The launch footprint covers the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Eight of the 12 are European. Two are in North America and two in Oceania.

The guide itself operates far more widely. According to the company, JustWatch serves more than 50 million monthly users across 140 markets, so the new service will reach fewer than one in ten of the guide's markets at launch. The company's headline nonetheless presents JustWatch TV as a service for the company's 50 million consumers. Its detailed text makes clear that the figure counts guide users worldwide, and no breakdown is given for the 12 countries where JustWatch TV will actually be available.

The selection mirrors the company's physical presence closely. The group employs more than 200 people, according to the company, with headquarters in Berlin and offices in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Munich, Dubai and Sydney. Every one of those cities except Dubai sits in a launch market.

The partners, and what is left unsaid about them

Five content launch partners are named: Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media. The company said many more would be disclosed later. How many titles each supplies, which tier they will appear in, whether any are exclusive, how revenue is shared and whether the line-up will be identical in all 12 countries are not addressed. Film and television rights are commonly licensed territory by territory, so a viewer in Vienna and a viewer in Toronto may not see the same shelf.

Paramount's presence adds a further layer. According to the Wikipedia entry, which cites a 2021 source, Paramount Pictures has been among the clients of JustWatch Media, the group's advertising arm, alongside Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures. The studio's parent is itself in the middle of consolidation. Paramount formalised its agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery on February 27, 2026, and chief executive David Ellison told analysts the company planned to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service with about 200 million subscribers. European approval followed in July, with Paramount required to leave the UIP distribution venture within 13 months. Which Paramount titles will reach JustWatch TV, and on what terms, is not specified.

Demand data turned into programming decisions

The company's central claim is that more than a decade of watching what people search for gives it an unusual view of demand. JustWatch lists streaming options for over 500,000 films and shows across more than 1,500 services, according to the company, and intends to use that intelligence to assemble a catalogue around what audiences are actually looking for.

"Every day, millions of people come to JustWatch searching for simpler ways to watch and discover hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows," said David Croyé, founder and chief executive of the JustWatch Group. "For over a decade, our mission has been to connect fans with their favorite films and shows, particularly the hard-to-find and previously unavailable titles. With the launch of JustWatch TV, we aim to make content discovery, access and engagement even easier."

Quentin Carbonell, senior vice-president of global content acquisitions and strategy, described the service as "designed to meet that demand head-on" at a time of fragmentation. "We are curating film and TV hits and hard-to-find gems that you can watch for free or rent on JustWatch, or easily rediscover them on your favorite services," he said. "This way, JustWatch TV aims to support the whole industry, from filmmakers to distributors to streaming platforms across the world."

The emphasis on obscure titles meets a documented concentration problem. When the European Audiovisual Observatory examined subscription viewing across nine EU countries between January and September 2024, using catalogue data supplied by JustWatch alongside Digital i viewing figures, it found that less than 0.1 per cent of works accounted for roughly 14 per cent of total viewing time. A deep catalogue can serve niche demand, yet on the largest services attention clusters around a tiny share of what is available. Can search interest in hard-to-find films generate enough viewing hours to fill advertising breaks at a price that satisfies rights holders?

From index to participant

JustWatch's value to viewers and to the services it lists has rested on its position as an index rather than a seller. According to the company, it supplies where-to-watch data and streaming charts to more than 1,400 partner websites and apps, so its rankings travel well beyond the JustWatch app. Now the index becomes one of the options it indexes.

The company describes a model in which people discover titles and then watch them either on JustWatch or on their preferred services elsewhere; Carbonell's reference to supporting the whole industry is its answer to the obvious objection. The mechanics are not explained. The company says nothing about how JustWatch TV availability will be ranked or labelled in search results next to rival services, whether viewing on JustWatch TV will feed into the streaming charts JustWatch publishes, or whether the 1,400 partners that take its data will see JustWatch TV listed as a destination. For streamers whose availability data flows through JustWatch, and for studios that pay JustWatch Media to promote releases, those details determine whether the guide remains a referee.

The direction of travel is familiar. Companies that control the moment of choice have been moving into content and advertising for years. Amazon turned Prime Video into a storefront for other services, adding Peacock Premium Plus in August 2025 as part of a strategy built around aggregation. Fox agreed on June 15, 2026 to acquire Roku for $22bn, a deal that would place the largest US streaming platform's home screen, The Roku Channel and Tubi under one owner. Samsung, which operates the free ad-supported Samsung TV Plus, opened its Smart TV home screens to programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and Google's Display & Video 360 in June. JustWatch approaches the same position from the opposite end: a discovery layer with no hardware and no home screen, adding a catalogue.

An advertising arm that buys media now has media to sell

JustWatch Media, according to the company, uses first-party audience data from the guide to run digital campaigns for studios, streaming services and media agencies across YouTube, Meta, TikTok and other large platforms. That is a planning and buying proposition executed on other companies' inventory.

An ad-supported tier inside the JustWatch apps changes the arithmetic. It gives the group video inventory it owns outright, next to a data asset built from years of search and watchlist behaviour. The company has not said how that inventory will be sold: directly, through JustWatch Media, programmatically through supply-side platforms, or some combination. No ad server, exchange, measurement vendor, ad format or ad load is named. Nor has the company explained whether behavioural data from the guide will be used to target advertising on JustWatch TV, a question with particular weight given that eight of the 12 launch markets are in Europe, where consent rules govern such processing.

The rental tier adds a transactional element that entertainment advertisers have been chasing elsewhere. Amazon built Sponsored Tiles on Alexa+ Echo Show devices partly around the purchase or rental of individual titles. JustWatch will now hold both halves of a similar loop: a media business selling campaigns that promote releases, and a storefront able to rent those releases. Whether JustWatch Media campaigns will point viewers towards JustWatch TV rentals is not stated.

That storefront enters a crowded market. TiVo's survey of 4,493 adults in the US and Canada found transactional video usage flat at 43.8 per cent of respondents in the fourth quarter of 2025, with average spending per user rising to $25.84 from $17.83 a year earlier. Amazon Prime Video led transactional viewing, followed by YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and Redbox Online.

The ad-supported market JustWatch TV joins

Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide found that streaming accounted for 66.7 per cent of time spent with ad-supported television among adults aged 18 to 49, with FAST platforms taking 19 per cent of that streaming time and non-FAST on-demand services the remaining 81.1 per cent. The Video Advertising Bureau counted 209.4 million US viewers of ad-supported streaming and cited a projection of $38bn in CTV advertising for 2026, equivalent to 43 per cent of television budgets.

Younger viewers point the same way. MRI-Simmons data from March 2026 showed 68 per cent of adults aged 18 to 24 and 70 per cent of those aged 25 to 34 preferring free streaming with ads over paid ad-free services, up from 60 per cent for both groups a year earlier.

Europe, where most of the launch countries sit, has separate data. A ShowHeroes and Omnicom Media Netherlands study of 4,377 consumers published on March 24, 2026 put FAST household adoption at 27 per cent across six markets: the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Five of those six are JustWatch TV launch countries. The same study found households keeping two to three paid subscriptions on average, with 59 per cent saying they wanted to lower those costs.

Scale among the incumbents is considerable. Samsung TV Plus had 88 million monthly active users globally, according to figures cited in its April 2025 partnership expansion with Magnite. Tubi was on track for revenue approaching $1.5bn in Fox's fiscal 2026, with more than 13 billion hours viewed annually, according to Lachlan Murdoch, and in August Tubi and FOX One gained Gracenote metadata on 55 million titles under an agreement covering content discovery. JustWatch's 50 million monthly users are guide users rather than viewers, and the company has offered no forecast of how many will become viewers of the new catalogue.

Where JustWatch sits in the viewing decision

The case for JustWatch's move rests on where it sits in the path to viewing. TiVo's fourth-quarter 2025 survey found that 40 per cent of respondents search through two to three apps before choosing something to watch. Companion apps, the second screen tools viewers consult while deciding, reached 33.5 per cent usage, up from 28.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2022. JustWatch was used by 11.1 per cent of all respondents, ahead of TMDB at 8.9 per cent, while IMDb stood at 37.6 per cent.

Those figures cover North America only, but they describe the asset JustWatch is trying to convert: intent expressed before a viewer commits to a service, which until now was monetised by sending people elsewhere.

How the guide grew

According to the Wikipedia entry, JustWatch was co-founded in 2013 by David Croyé, Christoph Hoyer, Kevin Hiller, Dominik Raute, Ingke Weimert and Michael Wilken. In a February 2017 company blog post quoted in the entry, Croyé described the co-founders as having "worked in leading roles at successful international tech-startups in Berlin." He had been chief marketing officer at kaufDA, a mobile coupon service sold to Axel Springer in March 2011, and reinvested proceeds from that sale; other co-founders came from the ad tech company Trademob and the streaming site MyVideo. Seed investors have included CG Partners and STS Ventures.

Development began in 2014, and the site went live in the US and Germany in February 2015. The company received funding in 2018 to improve databases within the European Union. In December 2019 it acquired GoWatchIt, a rival aggregator, from Plexus Entertainment, and used the deal to open its first New York office. The entry records more than 30 million users across 38 countries in 2019, a figure not described as monthly, more than 45 countries by 2020, and 139 countries with over 40 million monthly users by November 2023. The September 2026 figure of more than 50 million monthly users implies growth of about a quarter in under three years.

The two sources do not align on every point. The company states that the JustWatch Group was founded in 2014, while the Wikipedia entry gives 2013 as the co-founding year and 2014 as the start of development, and files the company under businesses established in 2015. The entry, citing a 2020 source, says JustWatch aggregated information from more than 100 video content libraries; the company now cites more than 1,500 services. Six years of expansion explain part of that gap, and a library and a service are not necessarily the same unit. The company also describes the group as founded with three divisions, one of which is only now coming into existence.

What remains open

JustWatch TV arrives with a clear structure and a thin public specification. For the services JustWatch lists, the question is whether a neutral directory has become a competitor. For advertisers and agencies, it is whether a company that has sold audiences on other platforms can build video inventory worth buying directly.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The JustWatch Group, the Berlin-headquartered parent of the JustWatch guide, JustWatch Media and the new JustWatch TV, led by founder and chief executive David Croyé, with Quentin Carbonell as senior vice-president of global content acquisitions and strategy. Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media are named as content launch partners.

What: JustWatch TV, a streaming service built into the existing JustWatch apps and website, offering free ad-supported viewing, transactional and premium rentals, and an ad-free subscription option. No prices, catalogue size, ad load or ad sales arrangements were disclosed.

When: The service was presented on September 15, 2026, and is scheduled to open to existing users in October 2026.

Where: The presentation took place at TIFF: The Market, the Toronto International Film Festival's content marketplace. The service will be available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, 12 of the 140 markets in which the guide operates.

Why: JustWatch says it wants to turn more than a decade of viewer demand data into a catalogue and to shorten the path from discovery to viewing. For the marketing community, the move creates new ad-supported video inventory from a company that has so far sold campaigns on other platforms, and it raises unanswered questions about how a where-to-watch index that feeds data to more than 1,400 partners will rank a service it now owns.