Source: I work at JustWatch.
If I go to justwaych.com/us, it changes to English, but now I suppose I am browsing US availability. Again, this isn't written anywhere, so I don't know if what I'm browsing or searching is available.
Would be cool to find all non-english films from europe and america.
0: https://yts.mx/browse-movies/0/all/all/8/latest/0/foreign
My kids now, before we buy an episode, say "Dad check on JustWatch if we can stream it for free anywhere"
Do you have public examples of others that use your API? I have a few ideas that can be used but no time at all to build things :)
I just cleared all my cookies and now it works again.
Not sure how big the problem is, but at least for me, your website seemed to be choking on its own cookies.
There's a trend in my country (Italy) where old movies are being remastered in HD but not published on Blu-ray. Instead, they're only made available on one out of a half dozen or so streaming services. JustWatch helps me immensely to spot new releases like that!
Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors. This is far too expensive to build for how cheap they‘re selling it.
Source: I work at JustWatch.
I bite: Aren't you also just scraping others?
Regarding your suspicion, surely this is not the first time someone making a smaller-scale, more humble and cheaper version of a future that some established companies already have.
There are two reasons for prices to be cheap:
First one is that I'm a solo developer who has been working on this for a couple of years now (I've launched the website in 2017, and since 2019 I've been working on to add streaming availability information). As I don't have a dozen people working on this but only me, it's only natural that my expenses are less than an established company.
Second one is that when I decided to add streaming availability information to my website back in 2019, all the available APIs were either: 1-not available for small developers like me, 2-too limited (like Netflix-only APIs), 3-too expensive for my student budget (as I was still a university student at that time). Due to that situation I was in, one of my aims from the start was to make this essential data available to small developers/teams/blog sites.
Does the Streaming Availability API use properly licensed data sources? If so, you might mention this on the marketing site, this would be a selling point for certain commercial projects. For that matter, it might be worth mentioning if the API can be used for commercial projects at all.
Scrapping is still a gray legal area but recently there were some court decisions in favor of scrapping already publicly available data.
The API can be used for commercial projects, it's stated in Terms of Use on RapidAPI page but I'm gonna make it more visible, thanks for feedback.
Apart from that, obviously I'm not a lawyer and everyone has to take their own decision but my two cents is that websites that use streaming availability provided in this API should be legally fine. In the end all you are providing to your users are some links (that are already publicly available) to streaming apps.
My linkedin profile is in About page of the link I posted. In RapidAPI page of the API, there's an about section with the button "Contact".
I've been working on this API for sometime now. Thought I'd share it here too.
This API allows you to query what's available on 20 streaming services (including Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu) across 60 countries. You can get the list of shows with filters such as release year, genre, IMDb rating etc. You can also get a show's global streaming availability via its IMDb or TMDb id. The output includes show's IMDb/TMDb ids/ratings, direct url to show's page in streaming apps, projected leave date from the service if there's one, and other details such as genres, directors, cast, runtime, overview, poster etc.
There's also a free plan that allows you to make 100 requests per day.
Hope you'll find it useful. And let me know if you have any comments or requested streaming services for me to add next.