Entertainment Sharing App Bingie Launches On IOS



When it comes to movies and television shows, we’re usually the ones who know best and we often let everyone around us know it. Whether it be Westworld or Lovecraft Country or whatever people are watching right now, we are wont to tell everyone about it, recommending they watch it because we like it. Word-of-mouth is still one of the best ways for a movie or TV show to gain traction, whether that word of mouth be reviews on Rotten Tomatoes or sharing our Letterboxd recommendations. Bingie is an app that streamlines and consolidates our recommendations for easy consumption by our social circles.

Launching today on Apple iOS, Bingie is a social platform that emphasizes word-of-mouth recommendations and creates a discussion platform around shared TV and movie properties. It gives more weight to recommendations from friends and family while creating an environment for debate and conversations. So if you’ve got a film school student in your household who is always being holier-than-thou when it comes to crappy movies, then this is the app you can use to contain their unrefined enthusiasm.

Bingie built its aggregation service off the back of statistics that it gathered through a consumer survey. It found that 42% of people are likely to recommend something to watch to a friend while 68% of people thing they are better at recommending things than the streaming services. That number should be higher as the suggestions offered by streaming services tend to be completely disjointed from what we’ve been watching. Additionally, and just an hour on Twitter after a new episode of anything should tell you this, 88% of people want to tell friends about a movie or TV show immediately after watching it.

The thing is, we generally just nod and make a mental note to watch it later. But that’s not enough. Only 20% of those surveyed write those mental notes down or add it to a watch list, and when people don’t know what to watch, 68% said they browse until they find something. Some nights it feels like we spend more time scrolling through programs on Netflix than we do actually watching something. Bingie aggregates content from all the major streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, HBOMax, Vudu) as well as some of the smaller ones.

The point is to create a hub that lists all available content on all the streaming services (only Disney+ already has a clear alphabetical listing of all available titles) as well as recommendations from friends and family so that you can find something to watch before you run out of time to watch something before bed. So less time wasted searching, more time watching something at least someone we know recommends.

Co-created by digital agency Wonderful, Bingie offers search, share functionality, conversation creation and a watch-list. The focus on the app is not only helping users to find what to watch next, but to create conversation around the films and shows users are watching. “We created Bingie to give people the ultimate entertainment recommendation app that is primarily conversation-focused and built for the user,” said Joey Lane, CEO of Bingie in a press release. “There are so many services and algorithms throwing recommendations at you, but when it comes down to it, we trust those closest to us to actually give us worthwhile show and movie suggestions. The sharing of shows and movies, the commenting, the debate, the opinions, the back and forth—that’s where the magic of Bingie is.”

In this reality in which we’re all separated by an inefficient government response to a pandemic, an app that seeks to bring us closer through our shared love of movies and TV can’t entirely be a bad thing. It’s a good thing. Creating conversation and interaction while still enabling us to entertain ourselves with movie and TV is at least one way to give the illusion of connectivity with each other in a world in which it’s momentarily limited. Plus, we all love telling each other what to watch.

Bingie is out now on Apple iOS and a Google Android and web version is coming soon.


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