

Show HN: findthin.gs - Find where to watch tv series & movies (RailsRumble) - suttol
http://findthin.gs

======
suttol
Hey guys - Our team made findthin.gs in 48 hours last weekend for this years
Rails Rumble (<http://railsrumble.com/>). We built it because we're from
Australia and sick of finding online services that are region restricted or
don't carry what we want.

Thus, we wanted to make it super simple to find where you can legitimately
watch tv series and movies online by taking the hard work out of finding where
it's viewable.

Our current version only searches Hulu, Netflix (in the US - If anyone has
advice on international API's for them, I'd love to know) as well as iTunes.
We're planning to support a bunch more services (in the US, Canada, Great
Britain and Australia) in the next few weeks.

Also, it's a bit buggy (due to time constraints) and I'm not sure how well it
works in non-WebKit browsers, but we'd love to know what you think.

~~~
mmvvaa
You may want to draw inspiration from <http://www.sidereel.com/>. Their
interface is not that great. If you guys could improve on that, you may be on
to something. Good luck.

------
gibybo
Wow, that is a beautiful design :)

I wrote something similar for <http://giby.tv>, though it's not really a core
feature for me and it doesn't recognize geographical restrictions, which seems
to be a primary motivation for you guys.

You guys make it look easy, but I think there are a lot of subtle gotchas that
others might not realize about this sort of TV data, for example:

Different sources of data (Netflix, Wikipedia, Network sites, iTunes, etc)
often disagree about what's correct, and there isn't really an easily
accessible canonical source. Sometimes an episode will release weeks earlier
in one country than another (e.x. Fox recently delayed a new episode of House,
despite it airing weeks earlier on another network in another country).
Sometimes iTunes will just give completely incorrect information about dates.

Lots of series names are reused by remakes. String matching by series name
will often lead to mismatching, for example, the 1961 series of 'The
Defenders' with the 2010 series of the same name. Or the US version of The
Office with the UK. Sometimes sources will disambiguate for you and append
something like (US) or (UK) at the end. Sometimes they only carry one version
and don't bother.

Sometimes a series will rename itself after airing a few episodes/seasons,
like 'Gold Rush Alaska' -> 'Gold Rush' after the first season. Not all content
providers will have the new name.

And episode titles are even worse. If you thought an episode had a single name
that everyone always agreed on, you would be sorely mistaken.

Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing you might also be
interested in tracking new episodes of tv shows at <http://giby.tv>, or
finding links for specific episodes i.e. <http://giby.tv/series/House> or
<http://giby.tv/series/The%20Office%20(US)> :)

~~~
suttol
Thanks gibybo - Our motivation for region issues is mostly due to being
Australia based and constantly hitting issues with finding content (Our TV
networks have a pretty bad rep, to the point where we're often one of the top
pirating nations for shows - e.g.
[http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/22/australia-top-game-of-
thr...](http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/22/australia-top-game-of-thrones-
pirating-nation/)). giby.tv looks very cool by the way.

It's indeed quiet a hard problem to solve - and I think it's going to be one
of the biggest issues going forward for exactly the reasons you mention.
Another one on top of that (another fun one: different punctuation in names,
inc. in the year and region suffixes).

There are a bunch of data sources we tap into / plan on tapping into the near
future that we hope will help solve these issues even more.

(The two of us developers work on music stuff which face very similar issues -
the annoyance of dealing with album, track and artist names across services is
a constant frustration).

------
ColemanF
I was thinking about trying to make a similar tool. I got the idea when I was
trying to decide in which format I wanted to buy the complete series of The
Wire. I found it too hard to compare prices between all the different sources,
including DVD. Google's Shopping results are only for the DVD format. I would
incorporate prices to make it more useful. Moki.tv was a good app that was
pretty similar. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/moki-tv-is-the-ultimate-
per...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/moki-tv-is-the-ultimate-personalized-
guide-to-whats-streaming-on-the-web/)

------
mourique
I'm from germany so i cant say nothing about the service itself, but i love
the coverimage-animation. It works great in this context!

Also you have a small code-glitch above the logo? or is it intentional? you
never know these days

~~~
suttol
If it's an ruby hash, that's unintentional. I changed one of the I18n paths in
the app at 5am (the competition finished at 8am for us) and changed it in most
places around the site. I missed the home page (since it uses image
replacement) but in some configurations (e.g. I think Retina MBPs in Chrome)
it shows up still.

We can't modify code until post-judging, so it has to wait until then to be
fixed. And thanks, the cover animation was the work of our wonderful designer,
@levibuzolic on twitter.

------
lmm
I can't see the highlight on the dropdown when trying to change where I'm from
- it flickers very fast and then just looks like white on white. (Chrome
21/linux/crappy ATI card, could easily be their drivers).

~~~
levinet
Ah I didn't have a chance to test the site on Linux -- once the Rails Rumble
comp is over I'll be sure to see what I can do to fix it. :)

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jrubinovitz
I love the design. Did you guys use any framework for the design, or is it all
you guys?

~~~
levinet
No framework. As Sutto said, we used SASS and Compass to make cross browser
attributes faster to write, but that's about it.

------
spobo
Check out <http://theat.me/>. Something very similar and 'designy'. And they
also index movies on crackle etc. A lot of free to watch sources. (usually
only if you are in the US though ...)

------
jiggy2011
Is that 3d scrolling thing WebGL?

~~~
levinet
Just CSS3 3d transforms. Should be hardware accelerated on most browsers /
platforms.

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marcusfrex
Is that only me that felt bad when i see that i have to pay to watch?

