Ideas Factory/ the foundry
← the floorif / 054·AI and software·live
What to Watch
Answers the question with one title, not another list.
The screen
the card's own material, at page scale> open ideas/054-what-to-watch --line machine
What to Watch
The brief
live · rev EA household shares one list — want to watch, watching, watched — and the app's only real job is answering "what shall we watch?"
Everything else answers that question with another list to scroll. This one asks what you are actually short of: something new or something you are part-way through, how long you have got, which genre, which service. It skips any question with only one answer left. Then it commits to a single title, flicking through the matches like a fruit machine before it settles.
If nothing on the list appeals it stops offering titles altogether and picks a genre to go hunting in, because at that point the list is not the answer tonight.
Status is shared, because you usually watch together. Ratings are per person. A series knows which one you are on and when the next lands, and something that is not out yet is left alone until the day it arrives.
One household with the family, another with friends, and neither can see the other's list.
The plates
2 · lift any one out
The log
4 updatesSeries and films drawn as a tray, and a pile nobody has started now says "0 of 5" rather than nothing at all.
The picker learned to ask how long you have got, and to choose from what is on screen rather than ignoring the filter you set a moment ago.
A series can say it is up to date, and stops being offered until the next one lands. That was the thing it kept forgetting.
First version. Households, a shared list, per-person ratings, and Firestore rules doing the actual work of keeping one household out of another.