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Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

It would be neat if we could easily wrap these various streaming services up in one UI so that you simply search for a movie and it streams it from Netflix or hulu if possible and bittorrent if not. Its unfortunate that in today's world this would get you sued out of existence.

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Tivo currently does this (albeit without a bit torrent option) for upcoming live TV, Comcast on-demand, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video and Netflix. There may be more now, but those are the ones I use. You search for a title and it will tell you where it's available and you can watch it from any of them directly from the Tivo UI.

That's a rather interesting startup/service idea. On setup you tell it what services you have accounts on, and then when you search it will tell you the options (with links to signup on new services), and always with a "BitTorrent at your own risk" fallback.

Roku does this. They have a universal search and any channel on the device that the movie or show is available on will come up with the pricing.

CanIStream.it is 90% of the way there to your idea.

It would be impossible to access content as Netflix, Hulu, etc. would most certainly block your service.

For them it's also about controlling the overall experience, not just regurgitating the content they serve (e.g. users spotting gaps in coverage).

On the contrary, Netflix recently shut down their API and CanIStreamIt was one of only 8 services they allowed continued access. I think they understand the value of it.

http://developer.netflix.com/blog

If enough customers are using those 8 services, then they're not going to shut it down with the API when they block everyone else.

It's a common deprecation strategy for APIs, and only proves Netflix is tightening control over their user experience.

This already happened with Google TV and various online video services. The original plan was to offer a service exaclty like this.

This is something that a company such as Microsoft or Apple should implement. It would be a killer app for either the X Box or the Apple TV.

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