Legal & privacy

What Lights Down is

Lights Down is a free website that helps a group pick a movie they can stream tonight. It is made by Somebody Decide, a small software studio operated by RapidShift, LLC. It has no accounts and never asks for a password. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by TMDB, JustWatch, Letterboxd, Microsoft, or any streaming service or film studio. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Privacy: what happens with your data

What you type in

The services you have, your country and how long you have are sent to our server as a question ("movies on these services, in this country, under this length"), which it passes to TMDB. The names you type never leave your browser. Nothing about you is attached to the question and no answer is stored against you.

Letterboxd usernames

Only if you add them. Our server then fetches that member's public RSS diary feed from letterboxd.com and sends the entries to your browser: film, year, rating, date watched, rewatch, and the film's TMDB id (used to look up its genres and keywords). Feeds are cached for 20 minutes per username so repeated loads do not hit Letterboxd; nothing is kept per visitor. Letterboxd diaries are public, but ask before you enter a friend's username; anyone can make their diary private in Letterboxd.

Server cache

Only public third-party data, never anything about a visitor: TMDB discover searches for 6 hours, movie details and availability for 24 hours, the lists of services, countries and genres for 7 days, the picture made for a shared pick for 24 hours, Letterboxd feeds for 20 minutes. Entries past their lifetime are ignored and overwritten. There is no database of people.

In your browser

Everything that makes the tool useful between visits lives in your browser's storage and never leaves your device. The keys all start with ld.:

• ld.services, ld.region, ld.time, ld.names, ld.lb — your setup: the services you ticked, your country, how long you have, the names you typed and any Letterboxd usernames, so the form is filled in next time
• ld.vetoes, ld.short, ld.hist — movies you vetoed, shortlisted or rolled (id, title, year, poster path)
• ld.sound, ld.party, ld.wheel, ld.trailers, ld.max, ld.filtersOpen, ld.msbest — preferences: sounds, party mode, dares or drinks on the wheel, the trailers joke, a maximised window, folded filters on phones, your best Mines time
• ld.session (sessionStorage, this tab only) — this evening's this-or-that picks as weights per person; gone when you close the tab

Clearing site data in your browser removes all of it. Lights Down sets no cookies.

Usage counts

To learn which features people use we count events: the page path, the event name (such as "roll" or "bracket started"), whether the browser is a phone, and the day. No IP address, user agent, cookie or identifier is stored with a count; counts cannot be linked to a person. Browsers that send Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are not counted at all.

Hosting and third parties

The site runs on Netlify, whose edge servers keep standard request logs (including IP addresses and page addresses) for a short time under Netlify's privacy policy. Your browser loads posters and service logos directly from TMDB's image servers (image.tmdb.org). "Watch this" and the where-to-watch links open TMDB's watch page for the movie (JustWatch's data); Letterboxd links open letterboxd.com; their policies apply there. The optional Internet Radio program streams audio directly from Radio Paradise or SomaFM, independent listener-supported stations; opening it is your choice and their policies apply to the stream.

Your rights

Because nothing is stored per person, there is nothing to export or delete on our side; everything lives in your browser. If you are in the EU/UK: the legal basis for the short caches is legitimate interest in running the tool you asked to use.

Children

Lights Down is not directed at children under 13 and knowingly collects nothing from them.

Terms of use

Lights Down is provided free, "as is" and without warranty of any kind. It may be wrong (a movie that just left a service, a runtime that differs by a minute, a certification missing for your country), it may be slow, and it may go away. Use it for what it is: a faster way to settle "what do we watch?". Don't use it to harass anyone, don't automate requests against /api/, and don't try to break it. We may change or discontinue any feature at any time. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for anything that happens as a result of using the site, including but not limited to the outcome of a bracket or the quality of the movie it picked.

Party mode

Party mode adds a spin-the-wheel penalty when someone overrules another person's bracket pick. The Drinks wheel is a joke for adults of legal drinking age who choose to turn it on; the app asks first, and the Dares wheel has no alcohol in it at all. Nothing on this site encourages you to drink: swap in water, know your limit, look after each other, and never drive afterwards. You are responsible for what you do at your own movie night.

Advertising and affiliate links

Lights Down carries no advertising, no sponsored placements and no affiliate links. TMDB's API is licensed to this site for non-commercial use; before anything commercial could ever appear here, a commercial licence from TMDB would come first, this section would say so, and affected links would be marked rel="sponsored". Rankings are computed from your picks and public ratings alone, exactly as described on the how it works page.

Attributions, trademarks and the 1995 look

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Movie facts, ratings, keywords and posters come from TMDB and its contributors under TMDB's API terms. Streaming availability by JustWatch. Diary data from Letterboxd RSS; not affiliated with Letterboxd.

Movie titles, posters and artwork belong to their respective studios and rights holders and are shown for identification only. Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, Tubi, Pluto TV, Kanopy, the Criterion Channel and every other service name and logo are trademarks of their owners; Lights Down is not affiliated with any of them. Microsoft, Windows and Windows 95 are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

Lights Down's appearance is an affectionate homage to the desktop computers of 1995. It is a parody and a fan tribute, not a Microsoft product: every window, bevel, icon and cursor was drawn from scratch for this site, every sound is synthesized in your browser rather than copied from any operating system, and no Microsoft code, fonts, images or audio are included. The little programs on the desktop (a mine-clearing game, a "defrag" animation, a dial-up tone, a screen saver) are original jokes in that style. If you are a rights holder and believe something here crosses a line, tell us and it will be fixed or removed promptly.

Radio Paradise and SomaFM are independent, listener-supported radio stations with no connection to this site; if you enjoy them, support them directly.

Contact, corrections and takedowns

Privacy questions and rights-holder notices: a public contact address is being set up and will appear here; this page is regenerated on every build. Movie facts come from TMDB — corrections made there reach this site within a day.

Changes

This page is regenerated with every build; the "page updated" date at the bottom is when its text last changed. Material changes to how data is handled will be noted here.

This product is licensed to: a group of friends who could not decide. Lights Down 95 — a Somebody Decide program — how the data works · back to the app.

Lights Down is a free tool: tell it your streaming services and how long you have, and it ranks what you can stream tonight, with a this-or-that, a roll, a bracket and a wheel. Movie data from TMDB; streaming availability by JustWatch. Page updated 2026-09-23. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Lights Down is a Somebody Decide program. How the data works · Legal & privacy · Tonight's lists