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Watching

Watch sources explained

Why a movie can have several watch buttons, and how sources stay fresh.

A "source" is one upload of the film on YouTube. Films often exist on more than one channel — an official studio channel and a regional distributor, for example — so a movie page can offer more than one Watch button.

  • Our crawler re-checks sources regularly; ones that disappear from YouTube are deactivated automatically.
  • New uploads on trusted channels are picked up daily (and within the hour for channels we watch closely).
  • Viewer reports also flag dead links between crawls — see "Report a broken link".