It's 9pm, the kids are asleep and it's finally time for me to relax and dedicate some time to myself so I open Netflix on my TV and... 30 minutes later I can't find what to watch. Alright, Prime? 15 minutes later - nope. HBOMax? Nope. What the hell? The most annoying thing is that I've just spent an hour of my precious time on nothing. And the reason is not that I'm too picky, but that I've already watched all those movies and there's nothing new released today. Same thing happens over and over again, I spend time looking for content to watch, but not actually watching it. I kind of understand it - they can't make a new movie that matches my taste every day. I'm not willing to continue wasting my time on nothing every night so I find a solution!

Once or twice a month I google for something like "what's coming to Netflix January 2022", read the page and add reminders for content I like to Google calendar. It works! The days I don't see a reminder I just plan to do something else like play on my XBox, read a book or work on one of my long-running hobby projects in the basement. I feel much better now knowing that I don't waste time on useless actions which don't have any outcome. Yeah, I think spending time on entertainment and hobbies has positive outcome for my overall health. Except TV shows, I don't watch them because they never end. Or they do, but next year. Maybe. Or maybe they will be canceled or postponed. Either way there's a good chance I'll never see the ending which leads to zero outcome.

Getting back to my solution - I can't believe there's no app for this, is there? Sort of. The most popular one has many more features and apart from it being very laggy using it reminds me of wandering Netflix catalog for 30 minutes, which solves the problem by creating another one. Hold on, I can solve this myself and share it with people, thankfully I'm a software engineer. So I made an app for solving this only problem - see what's coming soon to streaming platforms and set reminders with zero distraction from the task and spending as little time on this as possible. It literally takes me 5 minutes twice a month to set up my movie night schedule for 2-4 weeks.

If my story sounds familiar the app is called Streaming Schedule. It takes info about releases from video streaming providers directly so it even knows the time of the release and not only the date. It only requires swipe gesture for browsing and a single tap to set a reminder. It has data for Netflix, Prime, HBOMax, AppleTV+, allows filtering by genre (I'm not a fan of musicals or reality-tv) and is available in 15 countries. Oh, and if you think you might have missed something it has a history of recent releases.