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Comment by Saepirist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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