How We Check Streaming Availability

A title name alone is not reliable. Remakes, sequels, regional titles, and films that share the same name can point to different catalog entries. We use the TMDB movie or TV identifier attached to the page so the availability lookup refers to that exact catalog record.

Movie and television records are kept separate. We do not merge a film with a series simply because their names match, and we do not infer an edition, season, or cut that the source does not identify.

Streaming rights are licensed by territory. A provider carrying a movie in Canada does not establish that the same movie is available from that provider in the United States, Hong Kong, or any other market. FlixGeo reads each ISO country result independently and labels it with the corresponding region.

The country describes the catalog market in the source data. It is not a claim about travel access, account eligibility, billing location, VPN use, or whether a provider permits playback outside that market.

The watch-provider response groups offers into subscription, free, ad-supported, rent, and buy buckets. We map those buckets to plain-language labels without promoting a rental into a subscription result or describing an ad-supported offer as ad-free.

• Subscription means the title is listed in a flat-rate catalog; a separate plan, add-on, or account may still be required.
• Free means the source places the offer in its free bucket.
• With ads means playback is listed as ad-supported.
• Rent and buy are transactional offers and are not included with a normal subscription unless separately stated.

A provider listing does not necessarily include the current price, video quality, language tracks, accessibility features, plan tier, or expiry time. When those facts are absent, FlixGeo leaves them unknown. The provider’s own page is the final place to confirm price, plan eligibility, and playback before paying.

Likewise, an empty result means no offer was returned for that title and country in the data we received. It does not prove that the title is unavailable everywhere, and it may reflect a temporary upstream gap.

FlixGeo uses cached API responses to keep pages fast and reduce unnecessary upstream requests. Cache windows vary by endpoint, so a displayed result may lag a source update. Streaming catalogs can also change without notice.

For that reason, we describe provider results as availability information rather than real-time inventory. We avoid claiming that an offer was checked at a precise time unless the page has a verified timestamp from the relevant data process.

When a listing appears wrong, the most useful report includes the FlixGeo URL, country, provider, offer type, and the provider page that contradicts it. We compare the report with the upstream record and our mapping before changing an explanation or implementation.

We do not silently replace missing source data with sample providers. If a source request fails, the truthful state is unavailable or unknown until verified data returns.