Wow, after playing with it for 60 seconds my wife and I found a Humphrey Bogart movie we had never heard of that we are now going to watch. You should work on adding Amazon video links to it with a referral code, could be a good way to capitalize on this!
Had seen an app demo from a Melbourne based company who does most of this and had an Amazon link. Haven't dived deep in as it was a UX testing session.
Should I mention the name/link, not sure of the ethics of it when someone does a Show HN.
Wouldn't really benefit here as all you're showcasing is an Amazon affiliate link. If there's features they had over this one, or you were the person running that demo I think it'd be OK - but just for the purpose of showing an affiliate ID.. I don't think it's necessary. HN crowd knows what that looks like.
Don't know if it's a amazon affiliate link internally.
Lets you browse movies and you can queue it or add them to watchlist.
For each movie it shows if they are available on Amazon, Itunes, Netflix & one more
Looks good, but the one feature that I find lacking (in this and other similar apps, like http://omive.com) is the ability to "hide" movies I've already seen. Because otherwise I have to go through pages and pages to find a movie I haven't seen, let alone consider watching.
Multiple people said this, it's a shame how we didn't think of this before! We'll be adding this feature during the next couple of days! Thanks for pointing it out!
Hi oldboyFX, how are you doing with this feature? I would love to use movieio.me, but right now it is too time consuming to use because of all the movies I have already seen.
Missing feature: Sort by language. This is especially important for massively multilingual countries like India. Choosing 'India' lists hundreds of movies, but I would like to sort it by language (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc.)
That's an interesting and potentially useful idea, but if you go down that road, I think it'd be immediately relevant to also go into available subtitle languages. It also really depends on where this site gets its data from, as the "from [country x]" filtering can yield some questionable results.
Finally I can see and sort by RT rating which I trust way more than imdb.
You could also somehow link it to "popcorn time" then it will complete the loop.
Also a separate section for "available on netflix" will make this indispensable.
You could even add a weekly newsletter that shows... 1. new movies on netflix. 2. must watch classics etc base on my taste 4. new episodes of [walking dead] available
+1. I can't believe that still doesn't exist on the web. I have Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime accounts, but nothing will answer for me "Can I watch this movie for free somewhere?".
Filtering by streaming service is a killer feature.
With the exception of Amazon, who evidently weren't interested in cooperating, Tivo does a great job of this. You get some Amazon content but it's not the good stuff. For Hulu and Netflix you get unified search and you can do things like come across an in-progress movie in the guide, see that it's available on Netflix, and start watching it right away. I really wish Amazon would let Tivo have a decent app with Prime support.
If you're looking to do something similar, this exact same app for books would be welcome too. Also podcasts, audio content (recorded letters), music, etc.
Discovery is an interesting problem. Between mobile apps & google's overall approach a lot of discovery seems to be based on giving you the right answer. Sometimes what you need is not the right answer, but a good way of browsing. I like filters and dials as a way of searching for things. It's fun.
Just a tip, in case you find your way to adding it - while browsing through the India selection, I find that there are movies from different languages - I found Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil movies. My suggestion is that if you find a way to add a language filter, in addition to a country filter, that might help? This might be useful for others as well - for e.g a lot of Spanish speakers might look for movies from South America etc.
Related movies seem to be based on keyword search primarily, unconstrained by genre. But the keywords seem like sketchy content. Inception's keywords are "loss of lover dream sleep subconsciousness defense mechanism redemption," such that the top related movies are "The Science of Sleep" and "Sex and Lucia." Hmm... That doesn't seem quite right to me.
Similar movies are pulled from TMDB API. We have nothing to do with it. But you are right, in some situations similar movies don't make much sense. We have to dig deeper into this and find a good solution.
I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.
The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get Band of Brothers, Kill Bill, Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, and the latest American reboot of Godzilla. If it's intended to show movies set in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.
Also won't work with facebook/twitter/google. I authorise the app okay, but the modal doesn't close, and I don't get logged in. OAuth callback not working?
WHAT i would love to have is a way to mark the movies i have seen and perhaps filter them out from the list !
That would make my life easier in picking up movies !
Great interface. How about adding a small trailer button on each movie preview as well.
Would save people time of clicking for a movie and then going for the trailer. Just my thoughts.
I noticed this aswell, it happens with audience score of some fresh movies (less than 1 month old). We pull this data from OMDB, so we can't really control it. We'll try to fix most of these cases manually.
Really love the site and bookmarked. For an anime movie fan it's tough to find a nice place that does all the things you guys do in a user-friendly way, so this is epic.
Highest audience rated animation from Japan between 2000 and 2014? Bam, there you go. That's how you help people. :)
So thank you for making this. If you need any extra help / feedback in return, lemme know.
That exact kind of search (and more!) has been supported on the major private bittorrent trackers for years. They also have the benefit of offering all the movies with a single click.
The subtle UI stuff makes for a great user experience. Were there any other sites that gave you inspiration for the user interface? I didn't know this type of frontend UI was possible just using SCSS/jquery/coffeescript, hope is alive again! Also, APIs just let you download all their data into your own database? Thanks again!
very pretty and usable design. found some decent films already. overall, great execution – compared to similar services I've used.
I like that it works on mobile too, but why does the page need to be reloaded when I resize the browser width? upon resizing, I lost my scroll position and I noticed the text all became red at tablet-ish width.
Second this. Seems like the second most important thing behind the movie ranking is its availability on Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV - e.g. I want to find the best ranked movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
We tried stretching content to 100% of 27" viewport but it looked too cluttered. Imagine if you were reading a book where page width was half meter long. I hope you understand what I mean.
We could left align it tho. Didn't really try yet. Thanks for the suggestion!
Looks great. My company maintains a similar demo site where you can search movies by mood. For example, show me a funny movie that has some action in it.
https://jaman.com/
Well done. I always have a very bad time when trying to figure out which movie I want to watch, most websites have bad navigation / filtering capacities / just unfriendly in general. Movieo solves that problem elegantly.
While I agree, I don't think attempting to perfect a ranking algorithm is useful beyond a certain point. At least for the topics I checked, it's reasonably close; there were a lot I didn't agree with, but then if it yielded my exact personal ranking, a lot of others wouldn't agree with it. So it's a bit of a roll of the dice, which in a way is nice, since there's just no ideal algorithm to be found. Getting close, which in my opinion they have, is pretty great.
There are two rate by options "Top Movies" and "Strictly by rating".
"Top movies" take into account the number of votes and use the same algorithm as IMDB does for their top 250.
"Strictly by rating" does what it says. It sorts movies strictly by rating, and only includes movies that have at least ~8 reviews on RT, ~25000 on IMDB.
To be more clear, I suggest that Strictly by Rating require a minimum number of user reviews counted, and excludes movies with RT Audience reviews still in a "Want to See" status.
Is this being powered by freebase? I was surprised that the site wasn't user powered - that is to say, it is basically a UI with filters to browse an existing database. Tell me if I'm right.
Login with Twitter and Google doesn't work. After authorizing , the "Please sign in" modal just stays there. I don't use facebook as a policy. So I did not try it.
This is wicked. It's slow, probably getting hammered by HN and/or has to retrieve data from various online servers (imdb and whatnot) but it's wicked guys, congrats!
Yep, I feel bad for our server right now. We actually pulled all data (300k+ movies, 800k+ people) into our own database. If it had to retrieve from various sources in real time it would have crashed long time ago. Time to upgrade the servers and cache everything into oblivion I suppose :|
I like this a lot. The only thing I wish it had was links to which streaming services I can go to to watch the movie, or maybe that is there and I just missed it.
Came to request the same! Just curious, what's the stack and how long did it take you to build this? I love the look and feel... I am having some issues with signing in though. Twitter and Facebook oauth doesn't seem to be working.
Just cleared my cache and tried logging in via twitter and facebook again - still no luck. Nothing shows in the inspector either. Are you using any CDN service? Might take some time to invalidate the cache if so.
It's pretty impressive that you guys hand-rolled the front-end, any reason why you didn't go w/ bootstrap or similar since it's supposed to save you time? (at least on paper) Personally that's what I tend to do myself but just curious.
I like to have full control over my projects. I have my own mini css framework with all the stuff that I use regularly. I find bootstrap burdensome and restricting.
Same goes for JS. Frameworks offer convenience at the expense of flexibility. Movieo only has ~1000 lines of handwritten javascript... I'd never use JS frameworks for such a small project. And I'd never use CSS frameworks for any project ever.
That's my opinion, but I'm also known for hating on frameworks all the time so...yeah xD
We didn't use any front end frameworks or themes. The "look and feel" of the site was mostly inspired by the works from Julien Renvoye, Gilles Bertaux and http://letterboxd.com/
We didn't really expect this much traffic/good feedback. In the next week or two we'll be polishing the site and adding some much requested improvements. We need to collect our thoughts now and see what can be done concerning the Netflix integration.
I discovered trakt a few months ago - it's great! They offer an open API and store the imdb id for each movie, so it shouldn't be a problem to integrate it.
bookmarked. very intuitive & easy to use. looking fwd to updates. some movies are available for free on YT. perhaps they could be linked to. also whether streamable on netflix/amazon/... would be nice too.
We make no profit whatsoever. Movieo is our side passion project.
We could make money through ads(lame, not gonna happen), donations(we could add a button somewhere, but like anyone's gonna donate), amazon etc. links(we'll add those to movie page).
Anyway I doubt we'll make any money on this. And it doesn't matter since that wasn't the point. We just wanted to make something cool that people would use.
Also, we use free stuff all the time. Programming languages are free. Frameworks are free. Sometimes it's nice to give back to community.
We'll be able to put it in our CV's I guess (nobody cares about those either).
We are using data provided by existing API's, and it's far from perfect in case of countries. Many hollywood blockbusters have numerous country tags. For example if one scene was shot in france, or they partnered with french production or something, it will include the tag "fr".
We have some ideas on how to make this more accurate. We'll be improving it in the next couple of days.
