Keep Tabs on New Movie Releases With eTrizzle

As you know, I’m a pretty big fan of movies! Earlier this year I reviewed Movie Mate Pro, an app for tracking theatrical releases. There is another side to the coin though; what about movies out of theaters that are released for purchase or streaming? With the amount of different online options out there, it can get tough to keep track of them all. That’s where eTrizzle comes in.

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eTrizzle helps you decide what to watch while at home. It’s a simple app/website that will aggregate movie listings from several online streaming/purchasing services, including: iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, Redbox, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Redbox Instant, and more. Even better, it’s well-organized and easy to search.

The Home Screen: New Releases

When you first open up the app, you’re taken to a list of the newest releases from across all of the supported services. As you can see from the above screenshot, each listing includes the title, movie poster, and Rotten Tomatos rating. Pressing one of the movies will take you to full listing screen with ratings, synopsis, actors, rating, runtime, the ability to view the trailer, and the list of services on which the movie is available.

Single Movie Screens

As you can see, streaming services will not list a price, whereas downloadable versions of the movie will. Pressing on one of the services will take you to a webpage for that movie; while this is OK for services like Amazon and Redbox (and even Google Play, I suppose), this proves problematic for Netflix and Hulu, where you cannot stream from a mobile browser. eTrizzle should really check for the native app and then if it’s not installed, kick the user to the Google Play store or website.

I also feel that services like Google Play, Netflix, and Hulu should be checking certain devices or OS for a native app, but responsibility here belongs to eTrizzle.

This is really the main/only functionality of eTrizzle (hence the short review). However, the app does have some fantastic organization options I want to talk about.

Stay Organized!

eTrizzle lets you not only do a text search using the bar at the top of each screen, but also allows you to browse movies by a lot of different criteria. There are dropdowns available that let you filter by things like Genre, Service, and even New/Popular.

Dropdown options for Genre and Service

At the bottom of the screen there are also 4 buttons: New, Popular, Services, and Browse. While the first three are self-explainatory, Browse has some pretty nifty lists you can check out, including: Free, Streaming, and Top Movies of 2012. This is followed by a list of all the genres.

The Browse Screen

I thought this was a really nice touch as it gives the user different exploring or discovery options.

Wishlist

While I really do like the service, I think it’s fairly obvious that they are just generating content exactly as it appears on their website. I’d really like to see better native integration by calling on-device apps for faster streaming/purchase. This would make the app incredibly powerful. I’d also really like to see a “Favorites” option that would allow me to keep a list of the movies I want to see, so I could quickly rent or stream when I’m ready to watch them.

Conclusion

eTrizzle is a really nice aggregator that helps you keep track of newly released movies, available for purchase of streaming. While I will continute to use it for that reason alone, I really would like to see some tighter integration with Android to make it feel like a native app. Right now, it feels more like a mobile-optimized website. I’ll hold off on giving it a rating now and look forward to what the developers will do in future builds!