06 · 2026 · Consumer product
SwipeToWatch
A group movie picker: create a room, everyone swipes on the same deck, and the night matches on the title you all say yes to.
Overview
The nightly "what should we watch?" loop is a group negotiation that never ends. SwipeToWatch lets the night pick itself.
Create a room, share the code with whoever's watching, and each person swipes through the same movies - right to like, left to skip. When everyone swipes right on the same title, it's a match. Movie night solved, no debate required.
The build, in four parts
01 - 04
01 - The problem
The endless negotiation.
Deciding what to watch as a group is a coordination problem wearing a movie problem's clothes. Every person has a veto, nobody wants to sit through something they'll hate, and the "recently added" row gets re-scrolled a dozen times while the debate runs. The time-to-playback is the real metric - and it's terrible.
02 - The approach
Make the decision a game.
SwipeToWatch borrows the one interaction everyone already knows: swipeable cards. Right means "I'd watch this," left means "pass." No arguments, no pitch meetings - just fast, honest votes. A room is the shared space: one code, one deck, everyone swipes on their own screen. The system only needs to find the intersection - the movies everyone said yes to.
03 - The build
No servers to babysit.
A React SPA on Vercel - no server infrastructure to babysit. The movie catalog comes from TMDB's streaming data, so the deck is real titles with real ratings, not a hand-curated list, and filters keep it honest: genre, minimum rating, and which streaming services the group actually has.
Rooms are a lightweight realtime sync - join by code, swipe on your phone, watch the match counter climb on the TV. Solo mode is the same swiping with a watchlist on the side, so it's useful even when nobody else is around.
04 - The outcome
The picking is the fun part now.
Movie night went from a 20-minute negotiation to a two-minute game. The match mechanic means nobody has to argue a case - everyone's swipe is anonymous until the system finds the overlap. And because the deck is real streaming data filtered to what the group has, the match is always watchable tonight, not aspirational.
~20 min
of "what do you want to watch?" - gone
1 code
from "nothing's on" to everyone swiping
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