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Ask HN: Feedback about idea/prototype

6 points by maheshguruswamy ↗ HN
Hi all, I have been playing around with a idea/prototype (accessible at www.onlify.com) for a few weeks and wanted your opinions on 1) The validity of the problem (if regular people in fact have this problem that I am trying to solve) 2) Thoughts on how I am trying to solve the problem.

Now coming to the problem. It all started with my frustration with trying to find anything worthwhile to watch on online streaming sources (Netflix, Amazon Prime etc). Once you run out of the mainstream movies to watch, you are pretty much destined to read one movie description after another without actually seeing a movie. So I thought, wouldn't it be cool if there is place where people can submit awesome non-mainstream movies available on various streaming sources and let the community discover/vote on it. That's the idea behind Onlify.com, a place to tag ('onlify') and share non-mainstream movies. Besides what I have out there on the site, I also want to add a few more things

1. Use gaming techniques to give people incentive to hunt down the nicest movies they have seen on various streaming sources. Points, unlockables, leader boards etc. 2. Come up with a movie description language to help match a user's mood to a movie. For e.g.

I want to watch a movie about 'stylish gangsters' with a lot of 'bullets flying' and a bit of 'humor' results in Reservoir dogs. Metadata searching on steroids.

So if you guys can take a look at the site and give me feedback (either related to my 2 original questions, or just in general), I would appreciate it. Please keep in mind that it is just a early prototype. If I am convinced the problem is real, I will give the UI a overhaul and add more features.

8 comments

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schoash
The amount of movies in your index is very limited. I searched for movies by "Jarmusch" which is not mainstream in my opinion and nothing came up. The movies on the ranking list are all very mainstream. Maybe I don't get the point.
maheshguruswamy
Thanks for the comment. Right...that means no one has tagged that movie yet. If you want to tag it, you use the onlify tab.

The check for mainstream/non-mainstream does not exist yet, but will be there soon. I just wanted to see what kind of movies people will tag....and most of them turned out to be mainstream. I will clamp down the criteria soon. I will also nuke all the mainstream movies there.

kevbam
Hi, I am a big movie fan,especially indie movies. To answer your first question I like the idea of a way of helping me find movies that I may never see or hear of. However, I am a little confused about how the whole thing works. I think you need to be clearer on the landing page regarding what I as a potential user should do.Should I register first, should I begin by searching a movie related to my mood.

So to answer your questions I think the problem you are trying to solve is an existing one, but there are current solutions to it e.g currently, when I am looking for a good movie I go to metacritic.com and search for the highest rated movies. Anything I haven't seen I usually try and watch.

I hope this helps.Best of luck!

maheshguruswamy
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the landing page and the UI/UX work is a big piece of work that I need to get done. You mentioned metacritic...how easy/difficult is for you to find a indie movie there...and find a source where its available to watch?
maheshguruswamy
any other feedback guys?
tim_moon
I'm not much of a movie person, but I agree with what was said earlier about it not being clear how everything works.

For example, I click on rankings and have no clue how the rankings are determined. I click on a movie and I'm not sure what the additional features of OnLify are, so I'm not compelled to sign-up.

For something like this, I think integrating Facebook/Twitter is a good way of sharing because people can share their recommendations for movies via their own personal networks. However, be careful not to spam people.

Making it clear what OnLify does and how it does it would help a lot. Hope this helps!