Update, November 27, 2011: If you're looking for a live list of Hammer Films streaming on Netflix you can see it here.
To read more about the HammerFlicks project, click here.
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So, like six months ago I posted about an idea involving the Netflix API and trying to get a list of Hammer horror films available for streaming.
The good news is I've decided to carve out some time each Saturday and actually make this into a little pet project.
The bad news is that in editing the information about my app, I accidentally deleted my API keys and have to wait … and wait … on the news ones getting approved, which apparently is a process experiencing some delays lately.
Bummer.
Anyway, there are some interesting things that have happened since last time.
- The Netflix API is now totally about the Watch Instantly (streaming) catalog. See here.
- This PHP code example of hitting up the API which used to work out of the box now seems to require that I surround the keys like "term" and "output" with quotation marks a la:
$arguments = Array( 'term'=>'fargo', 'expand'=>'formats,synopsis', 'max_results'=> '1', 'output'=>'json' );
- Netflix now has this open OData API in the works, too. So I might not even need to use the old API that requires a key …
That's to say that while I need to read more, if the ODdata API is also only for streaming titles then I can still retrieve the Netflix movie identifier from the OData API for given titles. What this means is that I should still be able to pass a list of Hammer film titles to the OData API and scrape the results for the movie's identifier. This in turn means I can create a link so I can start streaming the movie by clicking on a hyperlink.
Here's an OData example for "The Name of the Rose" taken from the Netflix developer site:
http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name%20eq%20'The%20Name%20of%20The%20Rose'
Looking at the source for the results reveals the Netflix movie identifier like so:
<d:Url>http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Name_of_the_Rose/70000552</d:Url>
With that identifier, I should just be able to pass a link to the streaming page like this (must be logged into Netflix):
http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70000552
Ok, I just clicked on that and now there's a good possibility I'll be watching "The Name of the Rose" tonight … or not.
