Editorial Policies

These are working rules, not values. Each one describes something we actually do and is checkable against the site's output. If you find a page that breaks one, write to hi@itsreelio.com and we will fix the page or change the rule.

Editorial standards

We publish practical guides to watching film and television at home. We publish a piece when we can add something to it: a menu path checked against the manufacturer's own documentation rather than copied from another guide, a maintained schedule with a visible verification date, a primary document nobody else pulled, or original analysis of public data. We skip a subject where the only thing we could contribute is a rewrite of somebody else's version of it.

Every factual assertion sits on one of four rungs, and the prose has to make clear which:

Collapsing those rungs is how a publication becomes untrustworthy, so we treat it as a publishing error rather than a style choice.

The bottom rung says "we" rather than "I" because that rung marks the publication's own analysis, not a personal anecdote. We do not write in the voice of first-hand experience we do not have. A guide here does not say a setting was tested on somebody's own television unless it was, and does not report how often readers complain about something on a site with no such record. Where a claim needs evidence we cannot show you, we drop the claim rather than assert it in a confident register. That rule cost this site three sentences it had already published.

Headlines. The headline states the fact, and the body supports it. If the body hedges, the headline hedges, using "reportedly," "rumored," or the name of the outlet that reported it. We do not write "CONFIRMED" unless a named source confirmed something on the record, we do not write curiosity gaps that withhold the subject, and we do not publish release-date pages promising an answer the piece does not contain. A headline that oversells is the fastest way an entertainment site loses a reader, and we would rather lose the click.

Sources. Where a piece rests on a document, it carries a visible Sources block and at least one entry is a primary record: a manufacturer's own support page, a service's own help documentation, a filing, a published methodology, a court record. We link to that record rather than to another outlet's write-up of it, and our outbound links are followed rather than nofollowed, because honest attribution should pass value to whoever did the work.

Some guides rest on how an application is laid out rather than on any document, and where a service publishes nothing about a screen, there is nothing honest to cite. Those pieces carry no Sources block instead of carrying a padded one. Citing an unrelated page to fill a slot is worse than an empty slot, and this site has made that mistake and corrected it.

Fact-checking

One person does the reporting, the checking and the editing here. We are not going to invent a fact-checking desk, so here is the real process.

Before anything publishes, every name, spelling, date, platform, runtime, episode count, credit, budget and box office figure is verified against a primary record. Entertainment reporting is full of facts that are wrong in twenty places at once because everyone copied the same wrong source, so a claim being widely repeated counts for nothing here. If we cannot find the primary record, the piece says the claim is unverified and names who is reporting it.

The Sources block on each article is the audit trail, and it is public on purpose. If a fact surprises you, follow the link and check it yourself. That is the only version of "trust us" worth offering.

Maintained pages (release trackers, schedules, reference tables) carry a visible "Last verified" date. An old date means the page has not been re-checked, and we would rather tell you that than let a stale page look fresh.

Corrections

We publish three kinds of note.

• Correction. We were wrong. The note names what was wrong and what it now says, in plain language. Never "this article has been updated."
• Clarification. We were accurate but ambiguous, and the wording has been sharpened.
• Update. The story moved. New information is added inline and dated.

Corrections and clarifications appear at the foot of the affected article, signed by a named author and timestamped. They also appear in the public index at /corrections, which is reverse-chronological and permanent. The version of the article that existed before the correction is retained, so the record cannot be quietly rewritten.

A material correction updates the article's modified date. Fixing a typo does not, because re-dating a story for a comma trains everyone to ignore the date.

To request a correction, email hi@itsreelio.com with the URL, the sentence, and what the correct information is. We respond within 24 hours. If we were wrong we fix it and say so. If we were right we write back and show you the source.

Ethics

No pay-for-coverage. Ever. Not for an article, a review, a ranking, a mention, or a link. Not at any price, from anyone.

Press access. We hold no press accreditation with any studio, distributor or streaming service, we receive no screeners, and no coverage here is based on pre-release access. If that changes, it is disclosed on the article and on the author page, and any junket travel or accommodation is disclosed the same way.

Advertising. The site carries no advertising today. The intention is to fund it with display advertising, and when that starts, advertisers get no input into coverage, no advance notice, and no removals. Ads will be labeled, and we will run none on our policy pages.

Affiliate and sponsored content. We publish neither today. If we introduce either, it will be labeled clearly and kept structurally separate from editorial, and licensed editorial photography will never appear in it, which is a condition of our image licenses.

Conflicts of interest are disclosed on the article and the author page. If a writer has any relationship with a subject, financial or personal, it goes on the page or the writer does not take the assignment.

Site reputation. Writing this down before any traffic arrives is the point of it. Reelio does not and will not rent subfolders or subdomains to third parties. We do not run a guest-post marketplace, and we do not sell placements, link insertions or author slots. We do not host third-party content in unrelated verticals, and we do not widen the beat by buying coverage of subjects we do not know. Every page on this domain is produced under our own editorial control, by named people, inside the beat described on our About page.

AI use

Dated 31 July 2026. This policy is checkable against what we publish, so it is written to be honest rather than reassuring.

Permitted: research navigation and finding sources we then read ourselves, structural suggestions on an outline, line editing of prose a human wrote, transcription of interviews we conducted, and code, tooling and data-processing scripts.

Not permitted: originating a verdict, a rating or a ranking, which requires having watched the thing. Originating a reported fact. Holding a byline. Publishing generated text without a human reviewing it, including headlines, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text. Bulk or scheduled generation of pages from a keyword list, a feed or a database.

Every byline on this site belongs to a real person with a real author page. When this practice changes, the date on this section changes with it.

Reviews, which we do not publish

Reelio publishes no reviews, no ratings and no scores. There is no five-point scale here and no critic.

That is a deliberate limit rather than a gap waiting to be filled. A verdict on a film requires having watched the whole thing, and a rating attached to a piece written any other way is a decoration. This site does one job, which is telling you how to watch something and what the settings and the terms actually do. If reviews ever start, this section will describe how they are made before the first one runs, and the About page will change on the same day.

Spoilers. Some guides here necessarily touch what happens in a show, most obviously the ones about episode schedules and about artwork that gives things away. Where a piece reveals a plot point it carries the warning in the headline, because a spoiler in a search result is still a spoiler.