Open Netflix replacement API available | Hacker News Reader

Open Netflix replacement API available

andrew.im

51 pointschx12 comments

It's unfortunate that consumers of the netflix API will have to resort to this sort of web-scraping solution. Web scraping is more complicated than using a provided API, and more computationally expensive for both the servers and clients. It's a lose-lose.

I can't really understand Netflix's decision to close down their API. Surely the cost of maintaining it was not so high that it was a worse alternative than this.

It's not lose for Netflix. The programmer time maintaining an API is much more expensive and restrictive then the few dollars in computational resources you allude to.

Netflix reason when we had our few phone conferences was more so because of data inaccuracy. A lot of developers were not updating Netflix data and thus it was reflecting poorly on them.

That was their reason for me wanting to close mine down, they felt I was reflecting inaccurate data.

This looks really nice. While I'd probably be unlikely to use this; I'm sure a lot of developers would love this.

Nice to see some very simple wrappers as well!

If I could suggest an improvement; it would be to support other countries' Netflix's. The templates are very similar so it's a case of using a VPN on some of the scrapers to access other countries' Netflix.

"Finally the Flix/Netflix Roulette API will feature localization (finally), this will include all current regions Netflix is supported in and any future ones (its literally checking every second to see if a new country gets added)"

If the Netflix TOS is violated - isn't this illegal? If it is how has he managed to fend off the Netflix lawyers?

ToS has nothing to do with legality. Companies do not get to create their own laws.

A TOS applies to how you use the service, and what they would do if you violate their service i.e. terminate your account. I highly doubt Netflix would close your account if you used something like this, although they may email the author and tell them to discontinue development, that's another route altogether.

Not loading, but seems like it's referring to this: http://netflixroulette.net/api/

How legal is this?

Web scraping is generally considered legal, if you are following a sites robots.txt. Otherwise, sites like archive.org would not be possible.

Or, whatsit, Google.

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