How does everyone keep track of the movies you own across the vast amount of digital services? I have a MoviesAnywhere account which coordiantes most movies across the different platforms and does a nice job.
But…
The other day, I was looking for a movie I knew I owned and couldn’t remember if it was on Amazon Digital, iTunes, Google Play, Plex, Vudu, etc…
I was thinking about a manual method of going into each service and logging movies into a Spreadsheet or Airtable that would be available on all devices.
I decided to centralize only on MA movies and iTunes. I have a couple of exclusive Vudu movies from a few years ago, and ended up determining which ones weren’t MA by using this Chrome extension (which I installed in Brave) which let me log into Vudu and export an .xls file of my movies. The extension also claims to work with FandangoNow, Google Play and Movies Anywhere.
From there I just created a text file of those stray movies not on Movies Anywhere.
If you have numerous sources for your purchased movies, and you intend to keep them separate (or have no choice) then try to get a full listing and put them into Numbers/Excel, or a light personal database (Records.team is $15/yr, Tap Forms is $45 one time), or a home inventory app (lots of those, on iOS and macOS.)
I don’t know of a service which gathers this info for you, unfortunately. (For Netflix users, Coollector Movie Database is free and you can have it pull down your queue and history.)
An Airtable database could work. There might be a template online.
I have my Movies Anywhere, Prime, and iTunes accounts linked so I usually only need to search iTunes and Plex to see if I own something.
I have a license for DVDpedia on macOS from before I started digitizing the library. They have an iOS app that syncs with the main DB I can use for reference while away from home. I may see about switching back to it to see if I can make it stick.
My main source of movies is 70 % iTunes and the rest Vudu where digital is concerned. I too wanted to prevent rebuying movies like I did with Paddington so I purchased
My Movies Pro which made it trivial to get my movies in. However I started to long for a more Mac centric application so I’m testing Movie Explorer Pro which has potential but the developer seems to play more interest in his News Explorer RSS app understandably. For me it’s key to have iOS and Mac versions and MEP does not have a iOS equivalent making inputting of movies much more difficult. Luckily last version enabled to ability to import iTunes library so that helped a lot.
If Delicious Library 4 comes out and looks like a solid release i’ll likely jump to it so that I can use the same app to track movies, books and more.
I use Libib to catalog my books and movies. Libib standard which is free allow you to catalog 5 000 items and create up to 100 libraries. You can tag your movies and even put them into a group to sort your whole collection. There’s a free iOS app available.
Can you use Libib to track the movies in streaming services too? It looks like it is geared more toward physical products than “cloud” stuff. Maybe I’m wrong?
The Chrome Extension worked great. That showed me what I had in Vudu and MoviesAnywhere and if there was overlap. I’m gonna try to avoid too many places for my media, ‘cause it does get frustrating trying to rememeber where a specific movie is and how to stream it.
I own a copy of Tapforms to keep a list of the domains I own and keeping track of customers domain names/info and might just jump into it for this purpose too.
Best of luck. I’ve settled on using iTunes for everything possible, and only pick up movies on Vudu/Google/Amazon if they’re MA-compatible.
I strongly recommend creating an account with CheapCharts.info to track price-drops of movies, tv shows, Apple Books and even Mac apps. I only use the website to look at app deals, because those are not tracked in their excellent free iOS app. (You click through to iTunes to make purchases, and the site claims a 5% affiliate fee from Apple upon purchase.)
As you can see here, in the last 24 hours since I last launched the app there were 47 new price drops.
