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Comment by LAMike | Hacker News Reader

What is the coolest thing to come out of Netflix's API?

I'm guessing (and I'll admit I don't know this for sure, feel free to correct me if you do!) that http://instantwatcher.com/ uses it, which is a wonderful data-heavy interface for finding stuff to watch on Netflix Instant. It's much faster and more informative than Netflix's kind of shitty browsing experience.

That'd be my guess too. One of my never executed pet projects was a service that aggregated all of the streaming providers libraries and let me quickly filter between genre, provider and "magic" looking for something I'd wanna watch. Most of the other services don't seem to have netflix level APIs, so it would have taken some trickery to get something approaching a comprehensive catalog for them...

I built http://streamjoy.tv as an abstraction layer above netflix, itunes and amazon and I will attest it took quite some trickery to get something approaching a comprehensive catalog. Even things that should have been simple like using the main python library for Amazon's product api was not simple because I had to rewrite sections of the library that dealt with api throttling limits.

There are gaps in the APIs and though they can be dealt with, it was not always easy or straightforward.

Yep, it does. Amazing site too.

Good site, I use it all the time. Poster child for why Netflix doesn't like APIs very much, though: there's a giant Hulu banner ad front and center!

I'm a huge fan of this mashup [0] that shows the movies from the IMDB Top 250 are currently available on Netflix Streaming.

[0]: http://paulisageek.com/imdb-250-netflix/

I assume availability sites like http://www.canistream.it/ use their API. I don't know why you wouldn't want to share data that can help you acquire more customers for much cheaper than a lot of other routes for acquiring new customers. Not to mention allows your current customers to browser your catalog in different ways.

That's a pertinent question. For me the loss here isn't so much the present utility of the API, but where they could've taken the API in the future. This seems like a step away from whatever that would've been.

The Plex and XBMC Netflix plugins use the API to browse the available shows. I guess they'll be okay since they're allowing existing clients to continue access, but any future plugins for other platforms are DOA.

I'm guessing most of the third party sites with Netflix functionality are manually curated or just use basic title search. There's just no good way to throw together a list on the fly based on custom criteria. The OData catalog was much more flexible, but they never supported it or kept the info up to date.

Most of the main API team left the company ages ago. It's been dying on the vine for months. At least it's official now.

I always use http://goodfil.ms to review movies and queue up moves I want to see.

I had a small feature - importing ratings from Netflix in my (now abandoned) application "Movie Galaxy" http://5000best.com/movie-galaxy/

I built Flixeye: http://flixeye.com for watchlist notifications of streaming movies. Not sure if it's the coolest, but still useful.

Pretty sure movies.io uses them to generate the screenshot backdrops for search results.

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