Back in October, I compared the various online streaming services here and Netflix looked like it had the most offerings. But what if you want to search across multiple providers for your streaming content, and find out which one offers you the best deal? Enter CanIStream.It, a free iPhone app from Urban Pixels that allows users to search for movies. It is a great idea whose time has come.
We’ve written before about how poor Netflix’ own iOS app is here, particularly when you compare it to the full Web version run on the desktop.
You can see an example of its search results screen here. The streaming search app has been recently improved and now can search across Youtube Movies, Blockbuster, Vudu, and Crackle as well as Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. The new version adds the price of each movie rental or purchase, and you will be amazed (or maybe not) at how these differ depending on the particular movie and service involved. Urban Pixels has added the ability to embed a search result widget on third party websites so blogs and other movie review sites can put a widget on their site that shows where the movie is available. And they are working on an API so developers can use their results in their own apps.
