Watch lists are broken. Federation could fix them.

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for noti.group subscribers once a week. Lowpass is taking a winter break and will be back on January 8, 2026.

All I want for Christmas is to find that darn movie I’ve been meaning to watch. What was it called again? I could have sworn I bookmarked it somewhere…

If your household is anything like mine, you might frequently run into the same issue: There’s too much to watch out there, and keeping track of all the things you want to stream one day has become a nightmare. It’s not that there aren’t any tools for this. There are! And plenty of them! And they’re all easy to use! Which is kind of the problem.

Here’s what usually happens: I may be browsing Netflix, logged into my profile, and bookmark a movie I want to check out in the future. Then, my wife takes over the remote, spends a bit of time clicking through Hulu, and adds a show she wants us to binge to the watch list associated with her profile. Or so we think — until we try to find it again and eventually discover that she was actually logged into our daughter’s profile and inadvertently added the show to her watch list.

Then, the next day, we turn on the TV and see something fun on the homescreen. One quick button press, and it’s added to the watch list. Except, Google maintains this one, and it’s completely separate from all the other lists. Our family probably has about a dozen different watch lists. We don’t use them all actively, at least not when we’re in the mood to actually find something. But you can bet that there’s some really fun movie on our dog’s Tubi watch list (that my kids made), desperately waiting for us to finally remember where we bookmarked it.

There are apps that are trying to solve this very issue. Plex, for instance, has a pretty decent universal catalog of titles available across all the major streaming services and a watch list to remember your favorites. The app also does a good job deep-linking into third-party services, so you can jump directly to that Netflix show or movie rental on Amazon with one click. At least that’s true on mobile. On smart TVs, those deep links can be hit or miss, depending on the platform your TV is running. (Sorry, Roku users! You’re out of luck.)

The problem is that a universal watch list like this does require a lot more work on your part. When you browse Netflix at 11PM and stumble across something that looks interesting, you have to get your phone out, open the Plex app, search for that same title, and add it to the list. And when you finally get around to watch it, you’ll have to do the same thing all over again to remove the title from Plex’s list. That’s a lot of work for a little late-night TV.

The sad truth is that watch lists, as well-intended as they were, are broken. Here’s how streaming services and smart TV platforms could fix them: Instead of keeping all watch-list data in a silo, these services should enable consumers to opt into sharing it between services. That way, if I bookmark a movie on Netflix, the Netflix app shares that information with my Plex watch list. Once I watch it, it disappears from both lists again. And when my wife adds a Hulu show to our Google TV watch list, it immediately populates in our Hulu watch list as well.

Ideally, I’d want to have a bunch of different ways to enter this kind of data and just as many ways to consume it. Maybe I’d keep one master list maintained by Plex, Google, or another company. But I’d also want to be able to keep smashing that bookmark button in whatever streaming app I’m in and have all my lists across all providers update in real time. Granted, Netflix may never list titles that are only available on Hulu. But these days, shows regularly move from one service to another. What if Netflix internally made a note of shows I bookmarked on HBO Max and then added them to my Netflix watch list when those HBO shows eventually found their way to its service?

Once you have enough data flowing back and forth between streaming apps and watch lists, you may also be less dependent on profiles, which were always an imperfect solution. Sure, my wife and I may like different things on occasion. But most of the time, we watch TV together. So why not automatically sort our bookmarked shows and movies by genre, mood, and age rating, instead of siloing them in watch lists associated with individual profiles?

Federating watch lists, and liberating movie and TV show bookmarks from those silos, could also allow for a whole range of neat new use cases that simply aren’t possible today. What if, for instance, Spotify automatically generated playlists of the soundtracks of movies and shows you recently watched, based on the data of titles disappearing from your watch list? (Hat tip to J Herskowitz for this one.)

Unfortunately, streaming services are incredibly protective of their data. Companies like Netflix want you to spend all your time within their app and not with a third-party aggregator that might recommend titles from Hulu’s catalog based on your Netflix viewing history. In fact, Netflix is so protective of its in-app experience, and its own watch list, that it doesn’t allow Google TV users to add Netflix titles to their smart TV’s universal watch list. And none of the major streaming services, with Plex being the one notable exception, offers an RSS feed of your watch list.

But this time of the year, I can’t help but hope for miracles. Perhaps, there’s a streaming executive out there right now, still looking for a New Year’s resolution. Here’s a great one: Open the floodgates. Free the data. Let people remix it, build interesting hacks. Ingest as much data as possible from other services, and use it to help everyone find the perfect movie or show without having to scour a thousand lists.

Until that happens, I might just crack open a book. Now, if I could only remember what I wanted to read next…