Show HN: findthin.gs - Find where to watch tv series & movies (RailsRumble)
findthin.gs
findthin.gs
Thus, we wanted to make it super simple to find where you can legitimately watch tv series and movies online by taking the hard work out of finding where it's viewable.
Our current version only searches Hulu, Netflix (in the US - If anyone has advice on international API's for them, I'd love to know) as well as iTunes. We're planning to support a bunch more services (in the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia) in the next few weeks.
Also, it's a bit buggy (due to time constraints) and I'm not sure how well it works in non-WebKit browsers, but we'd love to know what you think.
I wrote something similar for http://giby.tv, though it's not really a core feature for me and it doesn't recognize geographical restrictions, which seems to be a primary motivation for you guys.
You guys make it look easy, but I think there are a lot of subtle gotchas that others might not realize about this sort of TV data, for example:
Different sources of data (Netflix, Wikipedia, Network sites, iTunes, etc) often disagree about what's correct, and there isn't really an easily accessible canonical source. Sometimes an episode will release weeks earlier in one country than another (e.x. Fox recently delayed a new episode of House, despite it airing weeks earlier on another network in another country). Sometimes iTunes will just give completely incorrect information about dates.
Lots of series names are reused by remakes. String matching by series name will often lead to mismatching, for example, the 1961 series of 'The Defenders' with the 2010 series of the same name. Or the US version of The Office with the UK. Sometimes sources will disambiguate for you and append something like (US) or (UK) at the end. Sometimes they only carry one version and don't bother.
Sometimes a series will rename itself after airing a few episodes/seasons, like 'Gold Rush Alaska' -> 'Gold Rush' after the first season. Not all content providers will have the new name.
And episode titles are even worse. If you thought an episode had a single name that everyone always agreed on, you would be sorely mistaken.
Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing you might also be interested in tracking new episodes of tv shows at http://giby.tv, or finding links for specific episodes i.e. http://giby.tv/series/House or http://giby.tv/series/The%20Office%20(US) :)
It's indeed quiet a hard problem to solve - and I think it's going to be one of the biggest issues going forward for exactly the reasons you mention. Another one on top of that (another fun one: different punctuation in names, inc. in the year and region suffixes).
There are a bunch of data sources we tap into / plan on tapping into the near future that we hope will help solve these issues even more.
(The two of us developers work on music stuff which face very similar issues - the annoyance of dealing with album, track and artist names across services is a constant frustration).
Also you have a small code-glitch above the logo? or is it intentional? you never know these days
We can't modify code until post-judging, so it has to wait until then to be fixed. And thanks, the cover animation was the work of our wonderful designer, @levibuzolic on twitter.