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Ask HN: Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker

3 points by hoffmabc ↗ HN
This is a second cut at a new application I am developing. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you have. The point of this is to allow users to track movies they've seen and get recommendations for new movies and there is a lot more other stuff being added. You are also able to subscribe to the site and receive discount movie theater tickets.

http://movies.blinkindustries.com

Thanks!

9 comments

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tdoggette
It looks sharp, but my main concern would be that anyone who's the type to watch and track movie watching already has Netflix and won't want to invest time in something else.

How are you swinging ticket discounts, by the way?

hoffmabc
I'm working on creating a Netflix importer option that could bring in all of your ratings. That might help a little in that. Bulk ticket discounts at this point.
waterlesscloud
It's my understanding from the Netflix TOS for their API that ratings can't be stored by a third party, for privacy reasons. Perhaps that has changed, or perhaps I read it wrong. I was skimming out of curiosity.
hoffmabc
I haven't done much research, but I do know of other very legit sites that do import Netflix ratings. Jinni.com is one example. Thanks for the heads up.
waterlesscloud
I looked into it a little more today via the dev forum on nexflix.

A couple of relevant threads-

http://developer.netflix.com/forum/read/49287

http://developer.netflix.com/forum/read/52540

In short, it looks like you can't get full ratings history, though you can get up to 500 of them. And you can't store for more than 24 hours.

Though several months ago Netflix said they were looking to change the api so you could get the full history and also to change their TOS so you could be allowed to store it as a third party (with sufficient notification to the user that you were doing so).

So it may work out in the not too distant future.

covercash
When I buy tickets, do you ship them to me or can I print them out immediately? Are they for a specific movie/time/date or are they generic vouchers?
hoffmabc
Ship them to you, no printing at this time. Generic vouchers good for any show, any time.