It's unfortunate that consumers of the netflix API will have to resort to this sort of web-scraping solution. Web scraping is more complicated than using a provided API, and more computationally expensive for both the servers and clients. It's a lose-lose.
I can't really understand Netflix's decision to close down their API. Surely the cost of maintaining it was not so high that it was a worse alternative than this.
Netflix reason when we had our few phone conferences was more so because of data inaccuracy. A lot of developers were not updating Netflix data and thus it was reflecting poorly on them.
That was their reason for me wanting to close mine down, they felt I was reflecting inaccurate data.
It's not lose for Netflix. The programmer time maintaining an API is much more expensive and restrictive then the few dollars in computational resources you allude to.
I can't really understand Netflix's decision to close down their API. Surely the cost of maintaining it was not so high that it was a worse alternative than this.