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Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

movieofthenight.com

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Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#81

Post by Saepirist »

endymi0n wrote: post #67
chris_st wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you keep the results up to date -- found a similar thing (without an API), and found lots of wrong results as services add and drop movies.

I‘m curious as well, as for so many countries ingesting and matching that catalogue including error correction is currently a full time job for more than a dozen people over 6 years and 10k+ per month in infrastructure costs. Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors. This is far too expensive to build for how cheap they‘re selling it. Source: I work at JustWat…

Hey, it's nice to see you people under this post.

Regarding your suspicion, surely this is not the first time someone making a smaller-scale, more humble and cheaper version of a future that some established companies already have.

There are two reasons for prices to be cheap:

First one is that I'm a solo developer who has been working on this for a couple of years now (I've launched the website in 2017, and since 2019 I've been working on to add streaming availability information). As I don't have a dozen people working on this but only me, it's only natural that my expenses are less than an established company.

Second one is that when I decided to add streaming availability information to my website back in 2019, all the available APIs were either: 1-not available for small developers like me, 2-too limited (like Netflix-only APIs), 3-too expensive for my student budget (as I was still a university student at that time). Due to that situation I was in, one of my aims from the start was to make this essential data available to small developers/teams/blog sites.

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#82

Post by slickdork »

This is well done, thank you. As someone who's currently learning a language using the refold method[0], this is really really helpful.

My one suggestion would be linking to letterboxd [1] in addition to imdb -- the user scores on letterboxd are more accurate imo than imdb as for what movies i'll like, and i can see what reviewers I follow rated a movie, etc.

[0]https://refold.la/ [1]https://letterboxd.com/

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#83

Post by tcmb »

Saepirist wrote: post #2

Hi people, I've been working on this API for sometime now. Thought I'd share it here too. This API allows you to query what's available on 20 streaming services (including Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu) across 60 countries. You can get the list of shows with filters such as release year, genre, IMDb rating etc. You can also get a show's global streaming availability via its IMDb or TMDb id. The output includ…

I already commented elsewhere, but just wanted to add that this is amazingly useful, especially via your 'Movie of the night' service. I've bookmarked it and foresee to use it often! Best of luck to you, I sincerely hope you get rewarded in some shape or form for building this!

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#84

Post by Saepirist »

tcmb wrote: post #83
Saepirist wrote: post #2

Hi people, I've been working on this API for sometime now. Thought I'd share it here too. This API allows you to query what's available on 20 streaming services (including Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu) across 60 countries. You can get the list of shows with filters such as release year, genre, IMDb rating etc. You can also get a show's global streaming availability via its IMDb or TMDb id. The output includ…

I already commented elsewhere, but just wanted to add that this is amazingly useful, especially via your 'Movie of the night' service. I've bookmarked it and foresee to use it often! Best of luck to you, I sincerely hope you get rewarded in some shape or form for building this!

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#85

Post by Saepirist »

jacobwg wrote: post #61
Saepirist wrote: post #2

Hi people, I've been working on this API for sometime now. Thought I'd share it here too. This API allows you to query what's available on 20 streaming services (including Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu) across 60 countries. You can get the list of shows with filters such as release year, genre, IMDb rating etc. You can also get a show's global streaming availability via its IMDb or TMDb id. The output includ…

Looks great! How have you sourced the underlying metadata? From past experience, access to such metadata, especially IMDb, was rather heavily restricted, requiring a paid licensing agreement for access. Does the Streaming Availability API use properly licensed data sources? If so, you might mention this on the marketing site, this would be a selling point for certain commercial projects. For that matter, it might be…

Hey, those are some valid concerns.

Scrapping is still a gray legal area but recently there were some court decisions in favor of scrapping already publicly available data.

The API can be used for commercial projects, it's stated in Terms of Use on RapidAPI page but I'm gonna make it more visible, thanks for feedback.

Apart from that, obviously I'm not a lawyer and everyone has to take their own decision but my two cents is that websites that use streaming availability provided in this API should be legally fine. In the end all you are providing to your users are some links (that are already publicly available) to streaming apps.

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#86

Post by Saepirist »

freewizard wrote: post #62

awesome tool! fount some interesting data explore the Compare Streaming Services section [1] For example, Netflix and Prime Video are almost equal on total number of shows (~5.5k movie + series) but on Netflix only 4% shows are from pre-2000, while Prime has 20%. Also HBO Max has half size of Netflix library, but when filter by IMDb rating and voters, the gap is much smaller, and in certain cases HBO even wins out. I…

Thank you! Nice to see the compare page is being useful to people.

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#87

Post by Saepirist »

_jstreet wrote: post #66

I've been looking for this for some time. It's really useful to be able to easily find out which streaming service a film/TV-show is available on (or not on!). Are you making any profit off of this, or is there any way to donate/contribute towards the upkeep of the project?

Thank you! I'm making profit off the API.

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#89

Post by anomie31 »

Saepirist wrote: post #2

Hi people, I've been working on this API for sometime now. Thought I'd share it here too. This API allows you to query what's available on 20 streaming services (including Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu) across 60 countries. You can get the list of shows with filters such as release year, genre, IMDb rating etc. You can also get a show's global streaming availability via its IMDb or TMDb id. The output includ…

This is really cool, but could I have a dataset instead of an API, for any price?

Re: Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries

#90

Post by wodenokoto »

dewey wrote: post #28
e40 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of https://www.justwatch.com/ which is a non-API version. Did they roll their own? Do they use your service?

It's all in-house, available in 84 countries and supports thousands of streaming services. There is an API but it's mostly available to larger partners: https://www.justwatch.com/us/JustWatch-Streaming-API Source: I work at JustWatch.

You need a way to change language on your webpage. Many, if not most visitors from UAE cannot read Arabic, and most AE websites will in my experience default to English. But justwatch has seemingly no way to change from Arabic when visiting from UAE.

If I go to justwaych.com/us, it changes to English, but now I suppose I am browsing US availability. Again, this isn't written anywhere, so I don't know if what I'm browsing or searching is available.

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