17 ms·

One Million page views on movies.io

81 points by FredericJ 14y ago

iuguy 14y ago
I think the thing for me that movies.io has that others don't is the top 50. It's a beautifully designed site that gives me access to a whole load of well presented information. I don't even torrent, but I've used movies.io to look for films that I haven't seen that might be worth looking into, and I can see the torrent element almost as secondary to some users. I hope movies.io succeeds, but not so much as to put it on the MPAA radar for a takedown.
- laacz 14y ago
  Rest assured, MPAA or alike won't leave them up for long. They should be smart as to where to host, and how to evade. Still, even if someone shuts them down, the idea of visually and functionally all-web-two-point-whatever torrent sites will live on. I believe, that early success of movies.io will be enough for others to try to follow the lead.
user24 14y ago
I still want to know how you do the background images. Congrats on building a beautiful product too.
- qxcv 14y ago
  It looks like it pulls data from the "backdrops" section on TMDb. See the movies.io page[0] for a movie and its corresponding[1] TMDB page. There's also a TMDb API method to get a list of all the relevant images in XML[2]. [0]: http://movies.io/m/jf http://movies.io/m/jf [1]: http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/61791 http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/61791 [2]: http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/methods/Movie.getImages http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/methods/Movie.getImages
- FredericJ 14y ago
  The backdrops are coming from TMDb. We were asked several times to write a blog post about the technology that's behind it. We are working on it. Hint: All Ruby on Rails, no NodeJS. Sorry guys
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    TMDb's TOS states that you can't "Use TMDb APIs in any manner or for any purpose that violates any law or regulation, any right of any person, including but not limited to intellectual property rights, rights of privacy, or rights of personality." How does this reconcile with your use for a torrent search engine?
    - FredericJ 14y ago
      We contacted them. They said they didn't had any issue with us using their backdrops and information.
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
        Thanks for the response. It's quite surprising.
        Turbots 14y ago
        Well, I hadn't even heard of TMDB before, and now I do, thanks to movies.io, so they must be doing something good!
PaulJoslin 14y ago
One of the trends I've noticed more and more over the last few years, is that Design is now a USP in itself. Take anything that already exists and execute it with better design / user experience and watch it become popular / successful. That said, it once again highlights that as developers, we shouldn't ignore design or think that just getting the basic functionality working is all that matters. Design in a consumer market is a major influencer, often more so than the functionality itself.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Torrent sites and programs definitely need better UI and UX if they want them to become mainstream.
obiterdictum 14y ago
OK, so, it's that post. Consider the following cases: 1. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not releasing source code. 2. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it without the artist getting compensated. 3. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of Facebook/Groupon and whatnot). 4. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested site. In all these cases, noone lost any money when bits got copied (in fact, sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK. I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see the cognitive dissonance.
- marquis 14y ago
  Perhaps a more relevant analogy would a hypothetical popular newspaper example: you can buy it at the local store of some countries on the day of release, or if you live in those country where you can access them online for free or included with your TV subscription, you're fine. But if you don't live in said country and the newspaper doesn't distribute to you, or it gets to you some months late and it's old news by then, you might go looking for other access avenues. You'd very much like to get todays news so you can participate in the global discussion. Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real conversation about it.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    The Avengers has been released nearly everywhere in the world, yet it leads in terms of piracy.
    - gibybo 14y ago
      It also leads in box office revenue, so I'm not sure that's sufficient to disprove a correlation between piracy and availability.
jasonlotito 14y ago
I still prefer the look of TorrentBulter.eu. It's default view is browsing the top movies, and displays them in a much more enjoyable manner. The details page on TB is also more feature filled, including a trailer as well (granted, these can sometimes be wrong). Movies.io, honestly, doesn't offer anything more, other than being newer. Maybe I missed something.
- mtgx 14y ago
  TorrentButler is especially good for "discovering" movies. Both are good for torrent newbies. I like Movies.io search a lot, but I agree it would best if one of them combined both features into one. Also, both should have their own commenting systems, to make it easier to find the fakes. Movies.io has something called "Verified" now, but not sure how that works. Are they just verifying them manually? That seems like a lot of work.
  - FredericJ 14y ago
    We are using the Fenopy API to get the verified status of torrents. We still want to keep a lot of features out of the interface. Power users will still prefer searching manually for their torrents to see information we don't provide (such like codecs). We want to keep our interface as clean as possible.
    - mtgx 14y ago
      To me both Movies.io and torrentbuttler address the "torrent newbie" market, as people who already know how to use torrents, can use TPB or other similar sites just fine. But right now I'd probably have to recommend both of the sites to newbies, one for searching and one for discovery. But I'm sure you'll have a lot of success just keeping it simple the way it is, too. It may actually be the main reason why it got so popular right now. So don't fix what isn't broken I guess. But since I think this is more for newbies, you better make sure there are no fakes in those 5 listings, either through a technical solution or by allowing others to make comments on the page, or at least use ratings for the torrent's quality or something (but make sure they understand it's not about the quality of the movie).
CJefferson 14y ago
Hope we will hear when your first user gets their internet disconnected, or has to pay a large fine.
nchuhoai 14y ago
I do tend to disagree with the sentiment on HN regarding some aspects of the "pirating issue". Common arguments are (as quoted from the text)and my symbolic translation to the HN world: > "Movie theater incomes are in most cases enough to cover the production costs. Their business remains viable even if people continue downloading their movies" in HN-speak: "Developer salaries are the highest in the economy, so their careers remain viable if people start copying their code" > "Isn’t the main goal of content producers that their content is seen ? Well. If you would charge less for a movie I would be glad to pay for it. But prices for buying movies online are just abusively high." in HN-speak: "The main goal of a developer should be to get the product/code in front of many people. If the price would be lower, I would buy it. Ergo, the price should be lower and if not, im just gonna take it" > "If I buy a DVD I have the right to do what I want with it" in HN-speak: "I know the terms and licenses of the code I am using. However, i dont like it, so im just gonna do whatever I want anyways." My view is that this is just like any other market: If you don't like the product or the way its sold under specific conditions, you always have the freedom of not buying it. No one is forcing you to anything. Also, before this whole downvoting madness starts, please consider that I'm just trying to voice my opinion and argument for my stance.
- FredericJ 14y ago
  I just wanted to point out the fact that we are working on referring to legal offers where these are available (especially in the US). We completely agree with the don't make me steal manifesto which explains the issue in European countries: http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/ http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/
  - nchuhoai 14y ago
    I have no problem with people trying to voice their opinions on distribution, price or convenience as your manifesto points out. I have a problem with the entitlement or even "right" to consume a product or service if you have other opinions on the conditions of such consumption. I say it again, if you don't like the conditions, don't buy. If you don't like a product in the store because of its price, it's apparence, it's production environment, what you do it to use your buying power and market pressure to force alternatives. If those alternatives do not spring up, that probably means that a sufficient amount of people are fine with the conditions of the product or service for the business to disregard people like you.
ya3r 14y ago
So, whats the tech stack behind movies.io?
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  ""It's a typical Rails 3 apps, Nokogiri used for scraping, PostgreSQL db (migrated from SQLite originally), jQuery+ui for the aucomplete (lazy, yay!), and that's about it :) "" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755
jameswyse 14y ago
Thank you for this, love movies.io, though how do you add movies to 'watch lists'? I signed up and found I could change a lists name but could never find any way to add movies to this list. The trailer feature is cool, but in order to close the trailer requires clicking the link again. It'd be cool if we could also press escape or click on the backdrop area to close it.
PaulHoule 14y ago
Right or wrong, this site looks like it exists to facilitate illegal movie sharing -- it's just a matter of time before the takedown notice comes. It's too bad because it's such a pretty site. It could use a better knowledge base (ranking and relevance are so-so) but it's really pretty good.
- MasterScrat 14y ago
  Coda.fm does just that for music, and has been online for years.
- optymizer 14y ago
  What library/toolkit are they using for the UI? The source has URLs to "/assets/<hex digits>" which looks very familiar, but I can't tell what they're using. Or is it all custom CSS?
mmanfrin 14y ago
I'm sorry for being cynical, but getting a million pageviews as a piracy site with a fancy interface is not really spectacular. You're giving away content that is normally sold -- of course people are going to use it. Not really impressed.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  Which sites sell torrent files or magnet URIs?
Mrtierne 14y ago
Avengers made money so piracy is OK in this case? Why don't you want to pay for the movie? Is the price too high? You don't like theaters? Piracy is not a good solution to this problem. Movies cost money to make and a lot of it, production through distribution. Yeah some make a lot money back but many don't make any. Working with movies I know that when you put little money into a project your chances of getting something good out of it are slim. It's clear there is a problem with the business model and someone needs to start coming up with a better solution, other than piracy. The solution needs one goal ... to make money for those that create the movies.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  I think the sentiment he is expressing is that studios complain that piracy is killing their industry. Yet, both piracy and profits are way up. Thus, the argument that "we have to do something about piracy!" and asking for more anti-piracy enforcement, is obviously incorrect. Note: The goal is NOT to make money for those creating movies. Copyright exists to make sure the public gets more works created. Granting a temporary monopoly on the content produced is only done so that the public ends up better off. Please keep the actual goal in mind. If works are being produced and being made available, then we're doing just fine. Copyright needs revisiting if we see signs that content production is going down. These days, we're seeing quite the opposite, with more things being produced by even more people.
stef25 14y ago
The look & design is great. I'd love it if you'd let me filter on rotten tomatoes ratings, discover movies in certain genres, especially more underground / art house type movies. Most of TOP50 is just cheap hollywood action movies that don't appeal very much.
krakensden 14y ago
You know what would be nice? If they added links to Amazon Streaming and Netflix when available. Some sort of nod towards paying for content.

81 points by FredericJ 14y ago

iuguy 14y ago

I think the thing for me that movies.io has that others don't is the top 50. It's a beautifully designed site that gives me access to a whole load of well presented information. I don't even torrent, but I've used movies.io to look for films that I haven't seen that might be worth looking into, and I can see the torrent element almost as secondary to some users. I hope movies.io succeeds, but not so much as to put it on the MPAA radar for a takedown.

laacz 14y ago
Rest assured, MPAA or alike won't leave them up for long. They should be smart as to where to host, and how to evade. Still, even if someone shuts them down, the idea of visually and functionally all-web-two-point-whatever torrent sites will live on. I believe, that early success of movies.io will be enough for others to try to follow the lead.

user24 14y ago

I still want to know how you do the background images. Congrats on building a beautiful product too.

qxcv 14y ago
It looks like it pulls data from the "backdrops" section on TMDb. See the movies.io page[0] for a movie and its corresponding[1] TMDB page. There's also a TMDb API method to get a list of all the relevant images in XML[2]. [0]: http://movies.io/m/jf http://movies.io/m/jf [1]: http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/61791 http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/61791 [2]: http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/methods/Movie.getImages http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/methods/Movie.getImages
FredericJ 14y ago
The backdrops are coming from TMDb. We were asked several times to write a blog post about the technology that's behind it. We are working on it. Hint: All Ruby on Rails, no NodeJS. Sorry guys
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  TMDb's TOS states that you can't "Use TMDb APIs in any manner or for any purpose that violates any law or regulation, any right of any person, including but not limited to intellectual property rights, rights of privacy, or rights of personality." How does this reconcile with your use for a torrent search engine?
  - FredericJ 14y ago
    We contacted them. They said they didn't had any issue with us using their backdrops and information.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Thanks for the response. It's quite surprising.
      - Turbots 14y ago
        Well, I hadn't even heard of TMDB before, and now I do, thanks to movies.io, so they must be doing something good!

PaulJoslin 14y ago

One of the trends I've noticed more and more over the last few years, is that Design is now a USP in itself. Take anything that already exists and execute it with better design / user experience and watch it become popular / successful. That said, it once again highlights that as developers, we shouldn't ignore design or think that just getting the basic functionality working is all that matters. Design in a consumer market is a major influencer, often more so than the functionality itself.

mtgx 14y ago
Torrent sites and programs definitely need better UI and UX if they want them to become mainstream.

obiterdictum 14y ago

OK, so, it's that post. Consider the following cases: 1. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not releasing source code. 2. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it without the artist getting compensated. 3. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of Facebook/Groupon and whatnot). 4. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested site. In all these cases, noone lost any money when bits got copied (in fact, sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK. I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see the cognitive dissonance.

marquis 14y ago
Perhaps a more relevant analogy would a hypothetical popular newspaper example: you can buy it at the local store of some countries on the day of release, or if you live in those country where you can access them online for free or included with your TV subscription, you're fine. But if you don't live in said country and the newspaper doesn't distribute to you, or it gets to you some months late and it's old news by then, you might go looking for other access avenues. You'd very much like to get todays news so you can participate in the global discussion. Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real conversation about it.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  The Avengers has been released nearly everywhere in the world, yet it leads in terms of piracy.
  - gibybo 14y ago
    It also leads in box office revenue, so I'm not sure that's sufficient to disprove a correlation between piracy and availability.

jasonlotito 14y ago

I still prefer the look of TorrentBulter.eu. It's default view is browsing the top movies, and displays them in a much more enjoyable manner. The details page on TB is also more feature filled, including a trailer as well (granted, these can sometimes be wrong). Movies.io, honestly, doesn't offer anything more, other than being newer. Maybe I missed something.

mtgx 14y ago
TorrentButler is especially good for "discovering" movies. Both are good for torrent newbies. I like Movies.io search a lot, but I agree it would best if one of them combined both features into one. Also, both should have their own commenting systems, to make it easier to find the fakes. Movies.io has something called "Verified" now, but not sure how that works. Are they just verifying them manually? That seems like a lot of work.
- FredericJ 14y ago
  We are using the Fenopy API to get the verified status of torrents. We still want to keep a lot of features out of the interface. Power users will still prefer searching manually for their torrents to see information we don't provide (such like codecs). We want to keep our interface as clean as possible.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    To me both Movies.io and torrentbuttler address the "torrent newbie" market, as people who already know how to use torrents, can use TPB or other similar sites just fine. But right now I'd probably have to recommend both of the sites to newbies, one for searching and one for discovery. But I'm sure you'll have a lot of success just keeping it simple the way it is, too. It may actually be the main reason why it got so popular right now. So don't fix what isn't broken I guess. But since I think this is more for newbies, you better make sure there are no fakes in those 5 listings, either through a technical solution or by allowing others to make comments on the page, or at least use ratings for the torrent's quality or something (but make sure they understand it's not about the quality of the movie).

CJefferson 14y ago

Hope we will hear when your first user gets their internet disconnected, or has to pay a large fine.

nchuhoai 14y ago

I do tend to disagree with the sentiment on HN regarding some aspects of the "pirating issue". Common arguments are (as quoted from the text)and my symbolic translation to the HN world: > "Movie theater incomes are in most cases enough to cover the production costs. Their business remains viable even if people continue downloading their movies" in HN-speak: "Developer salaries are the highest in the economy, so their careers remain viable if people start copying their code" > "Isn’t the main goal of content producers that their content is seen ? Well. If you would charge less for a movie I would be glad to pay for it. But prices for buying movies online are just abusively high." in HN-speak: "The main goal of a developer should be to get the product/code in front of many people. If the price would be lower, I would buy it. Ergo, the price should be lower and if not, im just gonna take it" > "If I buy a DVD I have the right to do what I want with it" in HN-speak: "I know the terms and licenses of the code I am using. However, i dont like it, so im just gonna do whatever I want anyways." My view is that this is just like any other market: If you don't like the product or the way its sold under specific conditions, you always have the freedom of not buying it. No one is forcing you to anything. Also, before this whole downvoting madness starts, please consider that I'm just trying to voice my opinion and argument for my stance.

FredericJ 14y ago
I just wanted to point out the fact that we are working on referring to legal offers where these are available (especially in the US). We completely agree with the don't make me steal manifesto which explains the issue in European countries: http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/ http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/
- nchuhoai 14y ago
  I have no problem with people trying to voice their opinions on distribution, price or convenience as your manifesto points out. I have a problem with the entitlement or even "right" to consume a product or service if you have other opinions on the conditions of such consumption. I say it again, if you don't like the conditions, don't buy. If you don't like a product in the store because of its price, it's apparence, it's production environment, what you do it to use your buying power and market pressure to force alternatives. If those alternatives do not spring up, that probably means that a sufficient amount of people are fine with the conditions of the product or service for the business to disregard people like you.

ya3r 14y ago

So, whats the tech stack behind movies.io?

pooriaazimi 14y ago
""It's a typical Rails 3 apps, Nokogiri used for scraping, PostgreSQL db (migrated from SQLite originally), jQuery+ui for the aucomplete (lazy, yay!), and that's about it :) "" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755

jameswyse 14y ago

Thank you for this, love movies.io, though how do you add movies to 'watch lists'? I signed up and found I could change a lists name but could never find any way to add movies to this list. The trailer feature is cool, but in order to close the trailer requires clicking the link again. It'd be cool if we could also press escape or click on the backdrop area to close it.

PaulHoule 14y ago

Right or wrong, this site looks like it exists to facilitate illegal movie sharing -- it's just a matter of time before the takedown notice comes. It's too bad because it's such a pretty site. It could use a better knowledge base (ranking and relevance are so-so) but it's really pretty good.

MasterScrat 14y ago
Coda.fm does just that for music, and has been online for years.
optymizer 14y ago
What library/toolkit are they using for the UI? The source has URLs to "/assets/<hex digits>" which looks very familiar, but I can't tell what they're using. Or is it all custom CSS?

mmanfrin 14y ago

I'm sorry for being cynical, but getting a million pageviews as a piracy site with a fancy interface is not really spectacular. You're giving away content that is normally sold -- of course people are going to use it. Not really impressed.

MichaelGG 14y ago
Which sites sell torrent files or magnet URIs?

Mrtierne 14y ago

Avengers made money so piracy is OK in this case? Why don't you want to pay for the movie? Is the price too high? You don't like theaters? Piracy is not a good solution to this problem. Movies cost money to make and a lot of it, production through distribution. Yeah some make a lot money back but many don't make any. Working with movies I know that when you put little money into a project your chances of getting something good out of it are slim. It's clear there is a problem with the business model and someone needs to start coming up with a better solution, other than piracy. The solution needs one goal ... to make money for those that create the movies.

MichaelGG 14y ago
I think the sentiment he is expressing is that studios complain that piracy is killing their industry. Yet, both piracy and profits are way up. Thus, the argument that "we have to do something about piracy!" and asking for more anti-piracy enforcement, is obviously incorrect. Note: The goal is NOT to make money for those creating movies. Copyright exists to make sure the public gets more works created. Granting a temporary monopoly on the content produced is only done so that the public ends up better off. Please keep the actual goal in mind. If works are being produced and being made available, then we're doing just fine. Copyright needs revisiting if we see signs that content production is going down. These days, we're seeing quite the opposite, with more things being produced by even more people.

stef25 14y ago

The look & design is great. I'd love it if you'd let me filter on rotten tomatoes ratings, discover movies in certain genres, especially more underground / art house type movies. Most of TOP50 is just cheap hollywood action movies that don't appeal very much.

krakensden 14y ago

You know what would be nice? If they added links to Amazon Streaming and Netflix when available. Some sort of nod towards paying for content.