These days, it can seem like sitting down to watch a movie or show via streaming can be anything but relaxing.
First, there’s the question of which platform to pick. There’s Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube TV, Sling and more. Plus on each one there’s a litany of TV series, movies and documentaries curated for each one. So, far too often, one finds themselves scrolling through an endless list of options but finding nothing to watch.
“The idea was simply what to watch, where to watch it and why to watch it,” Joseph Lane, CEO and co-founder at Bingie, told NTX Inno. “The entire premise from the beginning was share, discover, debate, laugh, cry, whatever about content from people that know you.”
To help cut through the fray, Dallas entrepreneur Lane and co-founder Matt Knox have launched Bingie, a viewing recommendation app that allows friends to connect so that they “never wonder what to watch again.”
The concept was created on a horseback riding vacation over a few drinks, when Lane and Knox, who also serves as a partner for California-based web design and development firm Wonderful Collective – which helped create the Bingie app. After acting as unofficial mentor to each other, the two had been looking to start a project together for years.
“In about 28 seconds I said, ‘I’m in, let’s do it,’” Lane said.
As serial entrepreneur, co-founding local companies The Service Vault and Meteora, as well as service as the CEO and president of NextJet, this is one of the first companies Lane has helped create that is headquartered outside of North Texas. Lane said Bingie and its team of about 12 chose Los Angeles for the company’s headquarters since the app focuses on the intersection of technology and entertainment.
However, Lane remains Dallas-based and hopes to eventually add a Dallas office as the app grows.
“I’m here, I’m a Texan, I live in Dallas,” Lane said. “Whenever we can office again, I’ll have employees here in Texas, which is important to me.”
While there have been a number of TV guide-type apps in the past and many of the streaming platforms have their own algorithms for curating suggested content, Bingie works off what Lane calls the “human algorithm.” Combining social media with a digital guide, through Bingie users make film and TV recommendations to their friends and explore what content is available on the various platforms.
“Our hope and our goal is to become a utility, where people say, ‘Hey, its Friday night I want to watch something with my wife or I want to watch something with my eight year old… and where do I find that recommendation,’” Lane said. “I think for us, we just want to take a little seriousness out of the things that are going on in the world and let people have a few minutes of fun while they’re talking about content.”
Bingie launched its app, which is available on the Apple, last month and has quickly gained thousands of users, Lane said. He said like many of the social media platforms that have launched in the past, Bingie is still growing and relies on users adding their friends to grow. However, the team at Bingie is taking feedback to help build out the apps capabilities, with future plans to add features like previews and make the app available through Android and web, as well as hopes to eventually take the company into the international market.
“I see ourselves as kind of right in the middle of all the fun that people are having finding streaming. And the bigger the streaming wars get, so to speak, the more important we become because we can help you sift through the content that’s there,” Lane said. “There’s a lot of streaming services coming online which is great for us. The more the merrier.”
And though Bingie’s launch was not timed around the pandemic, it is poised to grow as the streaming market expands. During the crisis, use of streaming services has grown. And companies like Netflix are spending billions on new content each year. In addition, new streaming services like Dallas’ AfroLandTV have been recently launched to bring content from across the globe to viewers.
Since being founded in January, Bingie raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount. The company also declined to name investors.
“There’s amazing content being made all over the world… just incredible content out there, but not everything is for everybody,” Lane said. “We really expect it to be a common things where people are like, ‘Bingie that’… that’s really our goal.”
