Those looking for more options out of their Amazon Fire TV or Roku streaming systems will have a new option available to them as the Watch This! streaming service has officially launched on both platforms.
Watch This!, an over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform, offers viewers a range of live programming options. Curated from a growing list of content creators, Watch This! offers live music, unscripted content, comedy, news, and even movies in both short and feature-length formats. Viewers without Amazon Fire TV or Roku systems will be able to watch series online at www.yowatchthis.com.
“I wanted to create a place where shows that don’t necessarily fit the cable network formats could display their work and be proud to tell the non-believers to sit back and Watch This!” said Chief Content Producer Carmen Simmons.
The Watch This! operation may be hard-pressed to find early viewers. While certainly, so far, Watch This! has several titles that likely wouldn’t be found anywhere else, it doesn’t have much in general. The seeds of a noteworthy idea have been planted here, however; the notion of even trying to find a “Blaxploitation-inspired” anything on any streaming platform is a forlorn hope, and Watch This! has just that in its series “Larry Dickem”. Shows like “Career Gems”, featuring a variety of entertainers and other figures, and “SuperSako,” following an Armenian rap star, will likely be otherwise-unknown hits with their target markets. It may remind you of Fuse TV, and may ultimately be able to compete once there’s more here to work with.
However, any service in which users can binge-watch the entirety of the service in less than a week will likely struggle to keep viewers engaged. Once you’ve followed the service’s call to action—once you’ve Watched This! fully—there’s not much reason to stick around. With so many other services available, viewers who showed up and Watched This! will be Watching Something Else! in fairly short order.
The free ad-supported streaming space is rapidly growing, with players like Pluto TV and Tubi continually adding more content and appealing to bigger audiences. For now, Watch This! appears to be among the pack of niche channels that are added to a service to bulk up the channel count.
If you’d like to sample what a premium video service is like, we recommend a 30-day free trial of Hulu.
Related: Best Free Video Streaming Services