Plotluck matches a group to a title. That's a different problem than matching one person to a title, and it's the one Plotluck is built around.
Every major streaming service recommends against a single viewer's history. That works when you're watching alone. It stops working the moment a second person is in the room — their taste doesn't average into yours, it competes with it, and the recommendation engine underneath most streaming apps has no mechanism for that at all. "What should we watch" is a different question from "what should I watch," and it's still largely unanswered. Plotluck is built for the group case specifically: two or more people, one shared decision, made together instead of negotiated out loud.
Genre tags flatten too much to be useful for a group deciding together — "Action" holds both a heist thriller and a monster movie, and neither person swiping is looking for the other's pick. Every film and show in Plotluck is embedded and clustered by what it's actually about, then named by hand, so the deck is organized into groups like these:
Merging everyone's preferences into one averaged "group taste" tends to produce a deck nobody in particular likes. Plotluck doesn't do that. Each candidate title is scored separately against every current player's own taste, and those scores are combined at the score level — biased toward titles the rest of the room has already liked — rather than the taste vectors themselves being blended together. The deck adapts as the group swipes; no one's preferences get diluted into anyone else's.
Plotluck tallies actual likes as the group swipes and calls a match the moment enough of the room has said yes: unanimous for a pair or a trio, and all-but-one once a group reaches four or more, so a single lukewarm swiper can't stall a bigger room indefinitely.
Sourced from TMDB, with streaming availability from JustWatch and filterable to the services your group actually has — so a match is something you can press play on tonight, not a dead end.
No account or email is required to use Plotluck. Each device is given a random ID in place of an identity, and your likes and taste are stored under that ID, not your name. There are no third-party ad trackers in the app, and anything tied to you can be deleted at any time from inside it. Full detail in Privacy and Terms.
Movie and TV data from TMDB. Streaming availability from JustWatch. Plotluck is not endorsed or certified by either — it's an independent product built on their public data.
Questions, a partnership inquiry, or a data deletion request: privacy@erinrose.net.