Hey everyone!

Last month Hideo Kojima was talking about his new favourite Sci-fi animation, and I got mega surprised to know it was 🇫🇷 French! Not only it is awesome (if you like Cyberpunk and Sci-fi), but it premiered in Europe from 2023! Somehow I completely missed it! :(

I’ve been adhering to the “movement” for a while, but not too much on media. After this I decided to watch/support more European media, but I very quickly realized that it’s fairly hard to find what even is European 😅

Almost all I could find was static “Top X European Movies” lists. So I decided to built something better myself, which resulted in WatchFrom.EU!

It’s a discovery website specifically for European cinema and TV.

Europeans are more than capable of producing awesome media, but we don’t seem to consume much of our own! (Watch stuff in other languages!)

While building the site, I actually found out that several English-language blockbusters I always thought were Hollywood were actually European produced! Movies like The Fifth Element (which I love), Lucy, and Resident Evil are some examples! (If you’re curious, I’ve started listing some of these in the “Curated Lists” section of the site)

Badge system:

Every movie or TV show on the platform is assigned a specific badge so you can quickly visualize where it’s from (or its “Europeaness” lol).

The media is categorized them into tiers so you can choose exactly how “European” you want your viewing experience to be. (This is done algorithmically, so I manually adjust/complete data all the time, let me know if something is wrong!)

Tech Stack:

In the same spirit, the infrastructure is built using as much European tech as possible too!

The servers are hosted in Germany by the French OVH and the code is stored in the German Codeberg!

Privacy:

I also happen to be delving more and more into the privacy-focused group lately, so the platform collects absolutely zero data. There are no ads, no third party cookies, and no accounts required. I intend to keep it that way as long as the infrastructure costs and my pocket allows it.

Not finished:

I’m not done, it’s still early stages, so bear with me!
I’m making it public now because I’ll be leaving on holiday soon, and it’s already in a launchable/usable state now, but I still have several features in mind to be added down the line!

I’ll be working on tracking European streaming platforms, better sorting, related media, mailing list with new releases, other UI languages, random recommendations and etc.

There’s also missing data, algorithm quirks on badge attribution and minor bugs left to squash, but it should be only up from here!

Hopefully WatchFrom.EU helps you guys find something new to watch tonight! 💪

  • futurp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    That’s a great idea! It was much needed. We’ll be happy users of your product. Thank you for doing that.

    I contribute to Choosing Europe newsletter. Every week, we recommend films, TV shows, music and podcasts. You’re right that the hardest part is sometimes figuring out which ones are European.

  • klu9@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Great resource, but a complicated issue. E.g. Peppa Pig is made in the UK but owned by a US company. (Wikipedia)

    I’ll still use this, thanks for making it!

    • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Yeah, I saw this too, but there was no easy way to fix it with the data I have.

      I do intend to try to solve it. In the future I’d like to add an “American/Foreign owned” warning / badge, but I need to investigate where to “mass find” this data, or perhaps manually insert it / community input.

  • Niquarl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I see you’ve got trailer links to YouTube perhaps you could include links to European sources when available, AlloCiné is French for example.

    • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      This is actually something I have on my list, the data source I’m using only supports Youtube and Vimeo.

      It’s a priority, but it’s something I want to find an alternative to, down the line.

  • velorutionnaire@jlai.luEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    Thank you for you very good work !

    I see you did not find a European database of movies and shows. Did you know and ask senscritique.com ? It is a french website for a database of movies/series/books/games/music/… It is fed by the community and they can have some additional information. For example, I am watching the Swedish/Danish series Broen right now on Arte (a German-French TV channel) and it does not appear on watchfrom.eu but it does on senscritique.com.

    Their database is very likely more oriented to a french context but maybe you can do something with it. They talked about an API years ago (on this question of the FAQ) but I see no information so I doubt it has been done. But you can still ask, you never know.

    • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Hey man!

      You said that it “does not appear on WFEU”, but the link you added takes me directly to it! It also appears when I search for it. Was that a typo? Or did it not appear to you at first (could be a bug)?

      I didn’t see senscritique initially, but it does seem focused on the French context, but who knows, I’ll look further into them. Thanks!

      • velorutionnaire@jlai.luEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        Ah sorry, it was unclear. I meant Arte and the other french platforms do not appear on the watchfrom.eu page whereas they appear on senscritique (being french and completed by french users). So it could be a lead to complete the “Where to watch” information you already have.

        Edit: actually I did not pay attention to the country filter on the “Where to watch” part before ^^ And I see you get it from justwatch.com. I’ll go take a look there to see how it works.

        Edit 2: ah but so does senscritique actually ; and Arte appears on JustWatch so I do not know what the difference is 🤔

        • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          23 minutes ago

          I got very confused at first, but holy shit! What a legend!

          You just spotted a significant bug with the streaming services code which can randomly cause services to disappear! Will fix it soon, huge thanks! It’s always good to have an extra pair of eyes on stuff!

    • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Thanks man!

      Even just checking out the Trending stuff on the front page (updated weekly) from time to time should let you find something nice!

      I actually found a lot of cool movies myself while developing it and seeing it update over time!

  • UnknowableNight@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    This is awesome! You should add a way to filter by country or language if you don’t have that already. I’m so happy to see this and I will definitely use this in the future, thank you for this!

    • skepller@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Thanks!

      There’s currently a language filter on the “Discover” page, but it only supports a select few languages (for now, I’ll be expanding it in the future)!

      By country could be something interesting too, in case (for example), you wanted to see something where the companies producing were French, but the main language was necessarily French, but that’s a bit harder to do and further down the line.