Show HN: Weekend project, shows when the next season of your TV show premieres
I treated myself to a solo hackathon this weekend and built
https://next-season-of.com. The data is scrapped from IMDB and the website is generated using the hugo template engine. There's still a lot of optimization to be done but I'm planning to use this as a learning ground to try and get my pages to rank in Google. It would be really cool to search "next season of Ozark" and see a link to next-season-of.com.
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The data does seem to be pretty solid in my random other searches though.
More importantly (to me), it let me see how few of the shows I watch are in IMDB.
I searched on "Expan" on your site and found The Expanse easy enough (the site is quite fast), but I still had to visit IMDB afterward - I wasn't sure if there was a season 6. IMDB confirmed there is, but as expected, with an unknown date.
So I'll leave this for you to consider - list future seasons, even if they include or cite something to the effect of "date pending". That might prevent visitors from needing IMDB or other sources in use cases such as mine.
Including episode air dates is another addition I'd vote for.
Nice work!
Great suggestions, added to the list. Excited for these improvements.
It does seem to have quite some overlap with https://next-episode.net
My biggest annoyance with TV is not knowing when it's time to come back and start watching again - this would totally solve that for me. I would pay for this.
Nothing I'm associated with, just been a happy user of the service for years now
https://next-season-of.com/the-office/
https://next-season-of.com/the-office-the-accountants/
The first I've never heard of before, and the second is some kind of web episode series for The Office (US). If I search on IMDB, the first result is The Office (US) and the second is The Office (UK), which is what I would expect based on ordering by popularity. Both of those seem to be missing from your results.
It has integration with Netflix (via browser plugin), Kodi and VLC.
I have been using it for years.
https://directoralerts.website/
I found it harder to start typing 2021 after the new year because 2020 was such an easy year to bang out on the number pad. My fingers and eyes got used to the symmetry of it.
I even made the mistake when typing the correction for OP in this comment.
The benefit you have, and I hope you stick to it, is theres no multiple paragraphs explaining the show before getting to the information that well, theres no idea when the next season is.
One suggestion, if there isn't a known set date (Example The Mandolorian, https://next-season-of.com/the-mandalorian/) don't show 'December 2021'. Also with that page, the top says 2022, but the next season shows 2021.
Quick edit: I wish you the best in the SEO game. You're going up against a lot of outlets with a lot of money thrown at ranking at the top. I'll be rooting for you, anything to chip away at the spam pages that are nothing but 'what we know...'
I’ve given up searching Google for information on the next season of a show. All the results are gamed by articles with no actual info, but from the search result summary appears to be what you’re looking for.
For example, if you search for “<show name> Season <latest + 1>“.
It seems every result, was updated in just the last couple of days (even if I’m 6 months behind), they clearly use tricks to make Google think its content was recently changed.
The titles are things like “Show name season x release date, details”, but the content is invariably a brief recap of what happened the last season. Followed by “regarding season x, no one has any idea when it’s coming, or if it’s coming, but here is our completely unsubstantiated vague guess...”
That's why all these garbage sites hide the information under a huge pile of useless text.
The pages exist only to lure you to the site under false pretences. If I wanted an analysis on the last episode season, I would have searched for that, but their title and summary deliberately mislead me into thinking it contains content which it does not.
People gotta get over Firefly.
And I'm not gonna lie I've only ever watched it once and never made it through a rewatch. The Whedonisms don't hold up for me.
Brooklyn nine-nine on the other hand shows Dec 31, 2020, but imdb shows "2021". not sure what the disconnect there is.
An alternative approach, if you are willing to limit how far ahead it can tell you of the next season, is to use TV listings. That will only give you a couple of weeks warning that the new season is starting, but for a lot of people that is fine.
I used to do something like that for movies on non-premium cable. For most movies I wanted to see, I'd wait until they showed up on some channel included in my cable package, such as FXX, Disney, TNT, Cartoon Network, USA, TBS, or similar.
I had a list of movies I was waiting for and a PhantomJS script that would go to the Comcast schedule site for my area and grab all the movies showing in the next two weeks, and tell me if any that I were waiting for were on any channels that were included in my package.
From a ui perspective, maybe make the actual next seaso date stand out more. When i first viewed i assumed that the next season would be listed after all existing seasons and totally missed it at the top (and i assumed you just didnt have data for the thing i looked up)
You did the right thing by scraping the data. That is the more clever way. Scraping is not illegal. Google does it every second of every day.
https://next-season-of.com/euphoria/
This is a problem though, since there are a lot of shows that share the same name. Sometimes they're related, sometimes not.