What was the app's name? I built the same thing but for Android app about 4 years ago: FixMyQ. It's still a painful use case that I wish they would officially implement, or at least be more transparent about. I always suspected that they didn't/don't want users to focus on movies expiring at all (makes sense). However, rather than educating users as to why this happens, they pulled the info like you mentioned. Such a shame!
It was called Queueview. I couldn't find its homepage (in sure it was taken down), but the Facebook page, complete with all the notices about the API changes is here: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=31...
From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.