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

movieofthenight.com

364 pointsSaepirist95 comments

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 includes show's IMDb/TMDb ids/ratings, direct url to show's page in streaming apps, projected leave date from the service if there's one, and other details such as genres, directors, cast, runtime, overview, poster etc.

There's also a free plan that allows you to make 100 requests per day.

Hope you'll find it useful. And let me know if you have any comments or requested streaming services for me to add next.

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.

You can change language and country independently from each other. Just click on the Account settings in the top left/right corner (depending on locale) and change it there.

When not signed in, the button just says "Sign In", which is not something anyone would look for a language change option - doubly so if the "Sign In" in is in a foreign language. There is plenty of space to add a globe icon or something like it directly on the page there.

Can I use it to find foreign films? Right now my best option is yts torrent tracker[0] but there's a ton of hindi films which I don't really like.

Would be cool to find all non-english films from europe and america.

0: https://yts.mx/browse-movies/0/all/all/8/latest/0/foreign

I love JustWatch, it's the first place I go when I discuss any show with friends, family, kids, anyone.

My kids now, before we buy an episode, say "Dad check on JustWatch if we can stream it for free anywhere"

Do you have public examples of others that use your API? I have a few ideas that can be used but no time at all to build things :)

One public example would be TMDb (The metadata source that also OPs project is using): https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/568124-encanto/watch

Letterboxd uses their API. I track my watchlist on Letterboxd and can filter movies available to stream in my subscriber services thanks to their use of the JustWatch API.

Not sure it matters much, but I had been using justwatch often. It stopped working for me a while back: search just wouldn't do anything.

I just cleared all my cookies and now it works again.

Not sure how big the problem is, but at least for me, your website seemed to be choking on its own cookies.

JustWatch is great.

There's a trend in my country (Italy) where old movies are being remastered in HD but not published on Blu-ray. Instead, they're only made available on one out of a half dozen or so streaming services. JustWatch helps me immensely to spot new releases like that!

What a great website. I use it all the time. Thank you!

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 JustWatch.

> Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors.

I bite: Aren't you also just scraping others?

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.

The data is updated daily, so new/removed movies shouldn't be a problem.

This is great! This is exactly what I've been waiting for someone to do. Google has done this on their "Google TV" device for some time, you search for a show and it shows you results across all of your streaming apps, it's not perfect but it knows where most things are, and I was wondering when I'd see an independent person release either an API or an App that does something similar. Good stuff!

Thank you!

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!

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 worth mentioning if the API can be used for commercial projects at all.

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.

Can I somehow get the list of all shows available on Netflix in country X but not in country Y?

API doesn't offer that feature out of the box but I believe you can pull off that with a bit of extra coding on top.

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

Hey, do you wanna have a regular dataset export or a one time export? You can message me over RapidAPI or LinkedIn to discuss.

My linkedin profile is in About page of the link I posted. In RapidAPI page of the API, there's an about section with the button "Contact".

I'm in Vietnam, the results are wrong.

I put the movie "Twilight" (the vampire cheesy movie) and the results show me that there is no option, while it is on Netflix.

https://www.movieofthenight.com/movie/Twilight/1912

https://www.netflix.com/search?q=twilight&jbv=70099113

Also 'Succession' is available in Germany on Apple TV+, the search says otherwise (not available at all in Germany).

Hey, just checked, in Germany it's available to buy on Apple TV but not it's not part of Apple TV+. Currently the API only supports Apple TV+.

Oh ok, I misunderstood that. Thanks.

Apple TV+ is only content made by Apple.

Thanks for letting me know! Gonna check how it went wrong.

My ublock origin adblocker is blocking ShareButton.js because of "Fanboy's Annoyance" filter list (a default one) and not loading ShareButton.js leads to a blank page.

Thanks for letting me know! Gonna check it.

Thx for explaining why I see a blank page, I have the same problem.

Great website! One thing that is missing: Availability is not the only criteria people use. One example: Last month I wanted to watch Superhero Movie, but I was in Spain, where a lot of movies are dubbed. I found out it was available on Amazon Prime (via another similar website to the one in the submission) but when I tried to watch it, it was only available in Spanish voice with English/Spanish subtitles, so obviously wouldn't work. Instead I had to result to using the holy pirate cove again to be able to watch what I want.

So if also audio/subtitles language could be added to this service, it would make it 100% better and more useful for solving the problem it's trying to address!

Thank you! Yes, I'm planning to add more details like these.

I would kill for language options on this. Having been studying Arabic while living in Northern Europe, none of the streaming services have Arabic dubbed shows. The only thing I’ve found is the expanse, which itself is in a different dialect than what I’m studying. Being able to easily search by language availability and subtitle availability would be wonderful.

Not streaming but https://yts.mx/browse-movies/0/all/all/8/latest/0/foreign has pretty good catalogue

IMDB itself lets you filter by language: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&releas... but it's PITA to then go and search for these films

Only works for Netflix but unogs.com let's you search by language and subtitle availability.

Thanks for the suggestion, planning to add more details about these kinds of things.

Nice, maybe someone could finally make a site that shows how many and which specific streaming services are needed to cover top20 movies and tv series of the year.

How would you define top 20 movies of the year? What would be the criteria?

Pick a site and use their list.

I.e. IMDb, trakt.tv, rotten tomatoes etc.

Neat idea. But, I am checking Snowfall TV show (https://www.movieofthenight.com/series/Snowfall/643) for Russia and site says it is not available to stream in Russia, but it is in reality, via Kinopoisk (https://www.kinopoisk.ru/series/909854/).

kinopoisk doesn't appear to be one of the 20 services it searches.

Got it. They get part of their content from Hulu, and if I select US, results are correct.

How often is the api updated ? And how did you collect thé data ? Very impressive

Thank you! The data is updated daily by automated tools that checks the services regularly.

This seems like the hard part. Does it need accounts with all the services, use a VPN to appear to be in each country, use a fake/rotating User Agent, etc

I too would love more technical details on the harvesting process. Something I’ve definitely thought about doing in the past but wasn’t patient enough to implement.

Depends on the service any of these might be needed.

What an uninteresting answer. People are interested in the technichal details, come on.

Haha, sorry. But actually it's pretty much it. You need VPNs to check catalogs in different countries, which is tricky for some services (like Netflix) as they try to block VPNs. So you gotta always have a large pool. Catalogs of services like Prime Video is just there without an account but for Netflix you need accounts to see the catalogs (and not to send too many requests otherwise they block you).

Rest of it is just writing some regular crawlers.

Cool, thanks for expanding and congrats on the project!

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.

In terms of language diversity, Netflix is doing the best with 45% content not in English, that is far more than anyone else (except Zee5 which is primarily Hindi). However when it comes down to a specific language, the number is usually much smaller and around 100, which is less than ideal for someone primarily consumes French/German/Chinese/Korean/etc. (tweeted more about this [2])

[1] https://www.movieofthenight.com/compareservices

[2] https://twitter.com/freewizard/status/1480246184887398409

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

Do you support searching which country a movie is available to stream in?

For example the movie It is available in Netflix Austria (but not many other Netflix regions), but to find that, I searched It, then randomly picked countries from the dropdown list. It looks like the API has country as a required field as well, so to do this programmatically it would be similar.

It's available on the API, you can use /get/ultra endpoint to see in which countries a show is available. Planning to add that feature to the web app as well.

Pricing:

https://rapidapi.com/movie-of-the-night-movie-of-the-night-d...

Free/Basic: 100/day

Pro: 30k/mo @ $9.90/mo

Ultra: 100k/mo @ $29.90/mo

Mega: 1M/mo @ $99.90/mo

I appreciate that this is available, so thank you. But it’s frustrating that this even needs to exist in the first place.

Great project!

Trying to find something good to watch on Netflix, my weekend project consisted out of extracting all movies on Netflix and sorting them by IMDB score. Here is the result:

https://oscarfranzen.com/netflix-by-score/

You might want to include a "new releases" section. Sometimes they release good stuff that is not rated yet.

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.

Small typo in the list of countries: “United Emirates” -> “United Arab Emirates”.

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/

Cool! Do you login with one account bouncing off 60 IP addresses?

Quick question... the filters let me select the Language the show is in, but I don't think that necessarily implies which country it's available in. Is there a way to filter per country/region the show is available in? I enjoy watching shows from different countries (different languages) but if they are not available in my country, then it doesn't matter.

Hi, there's also a 'country' parameter to filter country availability. i.e. if you set 'service' as 'netflix' and 'country' as 'us', it will only return shows available in Netflix US.

Thanks, I completely missed the country option at the bottom. The dropdown doesn't have a surrounding box, so it looked like it was just text to me.

One of our customers is using your API to automatically generate news for upcoming/changing/leaving shows. Keep up the good work!

Thank you, really cool the hear that!

I typed in Mad Men and it shows no streaming services for the United States but I know it's available on Prime Video at least.

Currently it only shows free (included with Prime) shows on Prime Video. I just checked it and Mad Men is only available for buying or via AMC+ channel subscription.

Interesting. I've been watching it and it's free (ad-supported) with Prime. I have not bought it and don't have the AMC+ channel subscription.

This is cool! At my day job I work on a lot of entity resolution/record linkage and have wanted to do something like this for TV/movie content. Maybe also linking against (ahem) non-official sources. How are you disambiguating different shows and movies and linking them to IMDb/TMDb?

I do have my algorithm to match them with IMDb/TMDb ids, though of course it's not always 100% correct.

Very nice. Maybe you could build a recommendation engine on top, Netflix seems to have a knack for recommending things I've already seen. Relies in me telling you which films I like of course, or an existing similar dataset.

Thank you! There's already a recommendation engine I've made actually, it's the home page of the link I put: https://www.movieofthenight.com/

Indeed, excellent work. Was thinking more of personal customisation based on previous selections/ratings rather than filters.

You can have that by signing in. Once you have couple of stuff in your favorites list, in Feed page a new row called "Movies for You" and "Series for You" will appear. Though right now it's updated every 24 so it might take up to a day for them to appear.

Ah, excellent. I will most definitely give this a go.

https://www.tvtime.com/

TV Time does this somewhat - track what you’ve watched and it’ll recommend other stuff for you. It also shows where to watch but needs some work on identifying what’s free vs paid streaming.

I would assume that's quite a hard project, considering that even for Netflix it took two decades of research and world-class AI competition(s?) with a million dollar prize(s?) :

https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-recommendations-beyond-t...

(Note that was for the much more USA-focused DVD by mail Netflix, so the current problem might be even harder to figure out !)

Since you say you scrape via VPNs, can’t they just send you cease and desist like tomorrow morning? Worst case your payment service will lock your money?

https://reelgood.com/ is really good. (US-centric)

Account required?

They say "streaming" but mean "video streaming". I thought it included music too but it does not.

Would be nice if it supported Kanopy, it has an eclectic catalog for free if accessed with a library card.

You should add an order by: Rating, Year, etc.

It's already supported! Different plans have different order by fields supported but if you have Ultra or Mega plan you can order by the following fields:

original_title, year, imdb_vote_count, imdb_rating

Very cool!

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