There’s growing hype surrounding a potential Netflix-based dating app called “Netfling“. The app, a proposal by an Amsterdam- and New York-based creative agency called SuperHeroes, would allow users to register with their Netflix accounts — as opposed Facebook accounts, which is the default for other apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble — and then connect them based on their preferences for TV shows and movies.
SuperHeroes is mainly promoting their idea through Facebook (so far they have 3,000 “likes”) in what amounts to a “Draft Netfling” campaign, since launching the app would be impossible without access to the Netflix API, which the streaming media provider shut down in late 2014. In their latest Facebook post, on July 18, SuperHeroes described Netfling as still “an inspirational concept”. Meanwhile, another potential Netflix-based dating app called Binger, which has near-identical branding to Tinder, says that it too is waiting for an open Netflix API to launch an app that matches users with likeminded television preferences. This means that the likelihood of Netfling or Binger actually working out in the near future isn’t good.
What is certain is that those of us using dating apps — one in five between the ages of 25 and 34, according to the Pew Research Center — will continue to see new and novel dating apps that attempt to mine information about our habits and preferences to determine our matches rather than requiring us to complete profiles, as the old guard of dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony did. Happn uses location. Hinge uses mutual Facebook friends. Tastebuds.fm uses musical preferences. Television and movies, for Netflix’s 65 million subscribers worldwide, may be next. It will, at any rate, make it much easier to get into somebody’s bed and “watch a movie” on the first date.