Show HN: A better way to find films to watch on Netflix | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A better way to find films to watch on Netflix

goodfil.ms

53 pointsgeelen44 comments

I'm not looking at this very deeply (on phone), but I think this does not make a good landing page. My impression of the copy is "sync what queues?" I have a Netflix queue; I don't want to have another one that needs to be synced with it. It sounds like it's creating a problem I don't have. There's nothing that explains the benefits of GoodFilms to people who aren't already users (like the front page does). Netflix already shows me "new" and "popular" films, which is not very useful anyway.

I suggest that if a user is not logged in, show something that focuses on what makes GoodFilms useful and that you can use your NetFlix queue on it instead of having to make another one. You can just say that you can browse on-Netflix films specifically; taking up a bunch or screen real estate with what amounts to an example of that does not explain it any better.

I agree. The landing page leaves much to be desired.

I've read over it a few times and I still have no idea what your service does or why I would want to use it.

Please consider revising your copy to focus on the benefits you're providing to me. What problems are you solving for me? Why is using GoodFilms going to make my life easier or better?

Good luck to you. Congrats on launching and I hope you do well with this.

Cheers.

Ditto. I left feedback on the site saying the same. I think there's potential here, but whether this service does what I wish it would is entirely unclear.

Also, have someone comb through the site for grammer - I got a sign-in prompt at one point that asked 'Already got an account?' This should be present-tense, as in 'Already have an account?' rather than past tense (e.g. I got an account yesterday).

Can't sign in without Facebook/Twitter.

Pass.

I wonder what the overlap between Facebook / Twitter / Netflix is and how much of the potential audience for a service like this is being neglected?

Ditto. I don't have a Facebook account. I kind of have a Twitter account but

1- I use it so little that I would have to look up my credentials and that's a pain

2- I will never sign into a new / unknown website with Twitter for fear that the website would start tweeting nonsense on my behalf.

With regards to #2, doesn't Twitter auth include permissions so most non-spamming sites shouldn't even have permission to tweet nonsense on your behalf? Or am I misremembering? (As it turns out, the only time I ever used the Twitter auth was about a year and a half ago or so, I think.)

With regards to #1, hilariously that's one of the problems that this sort of single-sign-on is supposed to solve.

One thing I would love to have is the ability to "hide" movies.

Often when I'm looking for movies to watch, I'll go through the process of looking it up on RT, if what I see there makes the decision that it's some direct to DVD crap, then I want to hide it forever.

In Netflix I've had to resort to giving movies 1 star ratings, but I'd love it if a site would just allow me to HIDE things, because sometimes I also just want to hide a good movie that I don't want to rewatch.

Err, are you using Netflix through the website? I see a big "not interested" button right next to the star rating widget...

I use iPad / Boxee and I haven't seen the button.

I'll install Silverlight and try out the web site to see if it's there.

It might be yet another feature that Netflix Canada is missing (like instant queue).

Netflix Canada definitely has a Not Interested button.

does anyone know if "Not interested" on Netflix factors into the ratings at all? Because I want to use it to hide the 100s of movies I've already seen that Netflix keeps showing me.

I think it does. To get a movie to show up again, you have to clear your "rating" for that movie.

yup, there's Not Interested right on the website. I'll have to see if it also works that was on the iPad when I get home.

Stupid Boxee.

Click Not Interested underneath the star rating.

Very nice, though a couple of things immediately jump out:

First, no https. I think it's something you owe your less technical users.

Second - no non-social way to sign up. Personally, I find it annoying when I can't use simple email/username+password login. I don't really want to give up my entire social graph+data just to try something out. I realize this might be necessary for your business model, but you can offer me the option to add my social data later on, and I will if I like your service.

I love this site, I use it all the time. My feature request would be for the site to recommend films for me to watch next. Sure you can see what friends are rating, but I don't have any (friend me? http://goodfil.ms/user/4221 ). And sure you can use the "find films" feature http://goodfil.ms/explore However, both of these lack a "based on your ratings we think your going to love Memento" or a "sure lots of people loved the Avengers, but your not going to like it"

Nevertheless, I will continue to use this site as a way to catalog all of the films I see and how much I liked them, and IMO there is no better service out there for this purpose.

Thanks for the suggestions. And you should have a new follower as of me, now :)

A question, what does the "watch again" rating matter for? I can't watch films multiple times, if I've seen it once I will never enjoy watching it again, but I'm concerned if I mark 0 on "rewatchability" that will affect the display of similar films?

Also, I've signed in and synced my Netflix account and it's still listing American Netflix films under "Recent Releases on Netflix". Might be worth excluding films that aren't available in my area (UK)

Protip: set up http://tunlr.net/ and use the American Netflix without a VPN.

Thank you! I've been a Canadian Netflix subscriber for a long time now, and I've been thinking of dropping it because the Canadian Netflix is a wasteland.

Also thank you, I was going to do it with a VPN but it's such a hassle for the Apple TV.

" I can't watch films multiple times"

Really? None of them? There are many films I wouldn't watch again, but there are also some that I watch over and over. Just watched Amelie for the 10th time!

It really depends on what makes the movie great.. If it's the surprising storyline, rewatchability is low, but that doesn't make it a worse movie.

For me:

If I haven't seen a film, telling me how many times I'll want to watch it isn't particularly useful (instead of just a normal rating).

If I have seen a film, I'll have my own personal opinion on how much I want to see it again.

"if I've seen it once I will never enjoy watching it again"

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but with Goodfilms, how many people who are rating a movie's rewatchablity have actually rewatched the movie they're rating?

Maybe think of it as "if you had to watch it again, how much pain would you be in?".

Spot on. It's a really good way of separating films.

Moreover if a movie is meant to be watched once, why shouldn't I watch it once?

http://instantwatcher.com doesn't need to connect your account.

FYI, if you have the IMDB ID for a movie, then you can link to Rotten Tomatoes using that IMDB ID.

Using the IMDB ID number, "0079501", you may access the Rotten Tomatoes Mad Max page using the following URL: Mad Max: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=007950...

I know you probably can't display the rotten tomatoes score, but it would be interesting to have that data internally.

I challenge anyone to find a movie with an RT score below 40% or IMDB score below 4/10 that was worth watching.

easy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367085/

It was a comment to the goodfil.ms guy, because they link to imdb not rotten tomatoes, and it's trivial to also support rotten tomatoes.

One thing that bothers me about most movie recommendation apps is that there is no way to filter movies by their rating. As far as I know, even IMDB doesn't have this feature.

I like watching movies with my family and its hard to find good pg or pg-13 movies to watch. The family section on most sites is filled with animated movies so if you are looking for a non-animated family movie you're out of luck.

I really hope someone out there is working on an app that gets you the best movies to watch that are safe to watch with young kids and family.

My uncle pointed me to the BBFC site, apparently their database is the bomb. We've considered integrating with it for Goodfilms.

They've got an iphone app too, if that helps.

edit: oops, the link: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/

I always find it difficult to come up with star ratings because I don't remember what ratings I've given to other things. I'd rather have a "rank in order of preference", or pairwise rank ("Did you like this more or less than..."). You can convert ranks into scores by looking at their position along a (probably Gaussian) probability distribution. Instead of having 1 to 4 stars you have -2 to 2 sigma.

I don't currently subscribe to Netflix but it seemed pretty user friendly before.

Amazon on the other hand is a totally different animal. I find Amazon's search for Prime (free) movies incredibly challenging. This kind of tool would add far more value to their system and is probably the only way I would browse if it were available.

Awesome design / interface. I saw this initially a few weeks ago and I'm really starting to come around to how useful it is.

Loved it overall.

Would be great if there's an IMDb link to the movie in the details view page.

I saw the IMDB link.

Add the end of any description: Read more on External IMDB External Wikipedia

I use this site quite a lot, it's very useful. Would be great if it had Love Film integration.

I'm not surprised, but yet, i'm somewhat disapointed that it doesn't take into account your country to filter netflix releases, it looks like a cool site but it's not as useful to people on other countries.

This is really great, but I think people would benefit from linking their Netflix accounts earlier in the process. I didn't realize what I needed to do for a while.

Why do I have to log in with a Facebook or twitter account when this is for Netflix? is there no way to just have a goodfilms account and then sync my Netflix?

The Find Films tab is awesome. Well done, guys; will be spreading this around to my friends :)

Agree with the others. No FB or Twitter, so can't try it out :(

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