12 ms·

Netflix Pulls Plug on Public API

127 points by bananaoomarang 12y ago

chops 12y ago
It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store. From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.
- dotnetkow 12y ago
  What was the app's name? I built the same thing but for Android app about 4 years ago: FixMyQ. It's still a painful use case that I wish they would officially implement, or at least be more transparent about. I always suspected that they didn't/don't want users to focus on movies expiring at all (makes sense). However, rather than educating users as to why this happens, they pulled the info like you mentioned. Such a shame!
  - chops 12y ago
    It was called Queueview. I couldn't find its homepage (in sure it was taken down), but the Facebook page, complete with all the notices about the API changes is here: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=310709142291577 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=31...
SpaceTacos 12y ago
Does this effect apps on things like smart TVs? I would think there is still a private api for licensed apps?
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  I don't think they use the API in question here. Also I think those might be developed / maintained by Netflix themselves.
  - mkawia 12y ago
    They have special SDKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs
- duskwuff 12y ago
  Many APIs, in fact. Netflix takes the odd approach of implementing a separate API for each client: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-inside-netflix.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-in...
JaredCubilla 12y ago
I was planning on using the Netflix API as a movie database for an upcoming webapp of mine. Anyone know any alternative movie database APIs?
- dsl 12y ago
  www.themoviedb.org is pretty damn good and powers a lot of the homebrew media center solutions. Edit: If it is critical to your app, you might want to consider licencing IMDB http://www.imdb.com/licensing/ http://www.imdb.com/licensing/
- nishonia 12y ago
  I used IMDB several years ago, but now see that their usage policy is restricted to "personal" use. Who is going to download 1.11 GB of compressed text for personal use? http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces
- johns 12y ago
  http://www.omdbapi.com/ http://www.omdbapi.com/ http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/ http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    +1 on rottentomatoes. easy to get an API key with reasonable rate limits for free, and the API has a decent fuzzy search. (you might have to do some fiddling with the results, but what you're looking for is usually there)
- toast0 12y ago
  Related, if someone knows of an API to get commercial links (buy/rent) from tmdb or imdb ids, it would be useful for me.
Animats 12y ago
APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service. Google once allowed search queries via a SOAP interface. That's gone. They also dropped RSS feeds. But the API for submitting paid ads, that works. The paid cloud services are fine. Twitter doesn't like third party Twitter clients any more and will pull the API key of anyone who writes one. A third party client might have a spam ("sponsored tweet") filter.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Twitter is back to trying to lure developers in; there will be another batch of whiny posts in 2 years when they pull the rug out from this new set. Devs should stop playing charlie brown.
  - msie 12y ago
    Did I miss something? What has Twitter done lately for devs?
    - wahnfrieden 12y ago
      https://dev.twitter.com/ https://dev.twitter.com/
      - msie 12y ago
        Yeah, that's a joke. What developers really care about is Twitter's API.
        AznHisoka 12y ago
        I agree. Nobody cares about Fabric. Who cares if it goes down, your business won't die. If their API dies, you can bet a whole lot of companies and their employees are basically screwed. Hootsuite, Adobe Marketing Cloud, BrandWatch, Buffer, Salesforce, SimplyMeasured, Oracle marketing cloud, etc, etc.
- 12y ago
LukeB_UK 12y ago
They announced the retirement 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171
- johns 12y ago
  Announced 18 months ago: http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public_API_Program http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public...
teacup50 12y ago
In case this wasn't obvious to you, Netflix is not the internet's friend, fun examples include: - Browser DRM (making it impossible to produce a fully functional AND open source browser) - HDCP-for-sockets (e.g., to replace HTTPS with something they can tie to platform DRM-protected key exchange -- http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m...) ... and now this.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Thank the studios for most of this - they will not allow their content to be distributed without encumberance. Even if that somehow makes them evil (or insert other derogatory words here), their assistance in the fight for net neutrality makes them very much "the internet's friend", IMO. FWIW, I find it very hard to get outraged about DRM when it comes to streaming services - the usual "fair use" things that DRM usually inhibits does not do so in the context of streaming. The only thing you can't do with an encrypted stream that you can do with an unencrypted one is record it, and you agreed not to do that when you signed up for Netflix anyways. In other words, you're getting exactly what you pay for with the service: Ephemeral, on-demand streams of content.
  - teacup50 12y ago
    > ... the usual "fair use" things that DRM usually inhibits does not do so in the context of streaming. Sure they do. Video rentals were based on the first-sale doctrine[1]; the video store bought the movie, the video store rented their copy to you, and you could play it on any device that was technologically capable. There was no end-to-end control over the production, distribution, and viewing pipeline: - Anyone could run a video rental store. - Anyone could develop and sell a VCR. - Consumers could watch the movies in any way they wanted, with any device they wanted, rented or purchased from any store their wanted. With DRM, that healthy competitive market has been collapsed down into: - Content distributors must license the media specifically for digital distribution, granting full control to the content owners (and increasingly are the content owners) - Only playback devices that are approved by the content distributors may be used. If you think Netflix is your friend because they support net neutrality, consider what it means when the distribution mechanisms for the content you might like to consume over that internet (apps, games, music, movies) are far from "neutral". Netflix — and other companies — don't simply want to be the pipes, any more than Comcast wants to be a commodity pipe. If they fight for net neutrality, that's a happy accident of their own commercial interests, but we'll have even less choice and competition than when we started if the Netflixs simply replace the Comcasts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
mynegation 12y ago
At least these news reminded me that I wanted to pull the plug on the membership for a long time, so I just did that. Not in the protest but because selection (in Canada at least) is abysmal. I wonder how many people relied on 3rd party software to manage and view their Netflix and whether it causeS number of cancellations to be big enough for them to notice.
notastartup 12y ago
This is why I see the trouble with the semantic web. If even large guys like Netflix are unwilling to share their API publicly then semantic web becomes something like a really expensive toy that people with very large pockets can afford or you end up scraping everyone to death. This is why I think strategies like Kimono and Import.io will fail.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Unless we move to open public metadata for common needs, with optional private annotations for those who can afford toys. A possible role model is Apple's support of OpenStreetMap as a defensive response to Google Maps, which has improved the quality of open GIS data.
saurik 12y ago
I do not understand the backend reason for this (and did not when I saw the announcements about this two years ago): while I can see not wanting to provide a full movie metadata API, having "is this or is this not available on Netflix right now" seems like a really important API to have, one that allows websites people use to browse and find movies to funnel users into Netflix (and seems a natural fit for their very popular affiliate program). Apple actually provides massive database dumps of everything available in iTunes, for free, to anyone who asks, which is why virtually every music discovery site or app has a "buy this on iTunes" button, not just "a small set of developers whose applications have proven to be the most valuable for many of our members" (which is a quote from the Netflix developer blog earlier this year; you have to pull this from Google Cache now, sadly). I don't see how "stream/rent this on Netflix" is a bad thing for Netflix (but am totally willing to believe I am not "seeing far enough", because this is not my area of expertise, hence why I am asking this question: I hope to be enlightened ;P). (edit:) I guess maybe for the same reason Uber and Lyft don't want APIs? Because they want to dominate the end user searching and discovery experience as well? But like, even Walmart and Amazon offer APIs... ;P.
- drawkbox 12y ago
  I agree it is shortsighted. It is probably a business decision to 'own the data' and control the storefront/display for margins. However not realizing that the data/api part is what helped them along in the first place and all this means is they lose control of the data. Cutting off the API does nothing to stop scraping which will happen more now and not funneled into a controlled/throttled/tracked usage of that data. Worst for Netflix is that other competing services will own more and more data instead of relying on theirs. Another streaming service could come along with that type of developer love again and catch Netflix high centered. This is a very business over technology/open decision here for a Netflix that has moved away from developer support with things like the Netflix Prize, that time is done and over. The argument of public vs private api usage that Netflix states how public api is only 0.3% is not valid because most public api usage just pulls data to cache and rarely hits the endpoint where private apis they use constantly track progress/settings/state etc.
- clinth 12y ago
fragmede 12y ago
What the name for when a company seems to have stagnated, based on the lack of change in their front-end, even though you're sure there're engineers diligently toiling away at things? Netflix's frontend has not have any real improvement in quite a while. "Share on Facebook"? "Kids Mode"? "Watched by Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)"? C'mon! Where's the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB integration? Why does their search still have zero options to help you search? Where's Netflix's rendition of A Better Queue or Instant Watcher? The shutting down of the public API wouldn't be such a big deal if they paid more attention to their frontend. It also seems that Netflix thinks that if they don't bring up the fact that there are movies that aren't on Netflix, we won't notice. The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. I know there are engineers there working on hard problems (the scale they operate on is amazing) but in the midst of the current mobile and UX revolution, all they've manged to do is add a frame around the results page so it's easier to search again? OKCupid is another site that comes to mind where it looks like the front end is just stuck and has stopped progressing. (Gmail gets a pass because Google just gave up and made Inbox instead.)
- saraid216 12y ago
  > The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. Last I heard (and this was years ago), the crap UX is an intentional design decision from the top. I can't say that about Google or Netflix, but AFAIK with Craigslist, they're deliberately not trying to make the UX modern.
- sjs382 12y ago
  The lack of frontend innovation might have something to do with the sheer number of native clients for different platforms. Software fragmentation can be a bitch...
  - benologist 12y ago
    Random missing features on every platform are also Netflix's fault. Whose else would it be?
- maxmcd 12y ago
  Why are new features and change inherently a good thing? In my experience building consumer products "feature creep", and "unnecessary complexity" are the enemy. Not lack of features and frequent updates.
jellicle 12y ago
Too bad, since there's basically no way to find what good content Netflix has using their inferior tools. From accounts which are permanently contaminated by kid shows (let your kid watch a few shows, you'll never get anything except cartoons recommended ever again, irreversible, no way to edit or start over) to discovery algorithms that just give you the same five shows (that you've already watched, on Netflix) over and over...
- jaredsohn 12y ago
  > irreversible, no way to edit or start over As of a few months ago, you can now remove titles from your viewing history. http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films-or-shows-from-your-ac-1633561640 http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films-or-s...
joshuak 12y ago
So now sort by recommendation ranking is truly gone even via other websites, along with Netflix being eliminated from data search such as apps that help you find where a show is available to watch (legally) across all services? Wow. I do not get this at all. I can't quite understand why so many big services avoid obvious features related to ranking and discovery. Is it because they've found that people just burn through their top 10% of recommended content, and then quit the service? This seems hard to believe. Is there some other reason I'm missing? I've been calling this "value evasion" to refer to obvious features that are consistently avoided by many top web services, and working to understand what the point of hiding that functionality is for a while now. There must be really clear reasoning as to why it's a bad idea, but I have to admit I'm stumped.

127 points by bananaoomarang 12y ago

chops 12y ago

It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store. From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.

dotnetkow 12y ago
What was the app's name? I built the same thing but for Android app about 4 years ago: FixMyQ. It's still a painful use case that I wish they would officially implement, or at least be more transparent about. I always suspected that they didn't/don't want users to focus on movies expiring at all (makes sense). However, rather than educating users as to why this happens, they pulled the info like you mentioned. Such a shame!
- chops 12y ago
  It was called Queueview. I couldn't find its homepage (in sure it was taken down), but the Facebook page, complete with all the notices about the API changes is here: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=310709142291577 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=31...

SpaceTacos 12y ago

Does this effect apps on things like smart TVs? I would think there is still a private api for licensed apps?

giancarlostoro 12y ago
I don't think they use the API in question here. Also I think those might be developed / maintained by Netflix themselves.
- mkawia 12y ago
  They have special SDKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs
duskwuff 12y ago
Many APIs, in fact. Netflix takes the odd approach of implementing a separate API for each client: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-inside-netflix.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-in...

JaredCubilla 12y ago

I was planning on using the Netflix API as a movie database for an upcoming webapp of mine. Anyone know any alternative movie database APIs?

dsl 12y ago
www.themoviedb.org is pretty damn good and powers a lot of the homebrew media center solutions. Edit: If it is critical to your app, you might want to consider licencing IMDB http://www.imdb.com/licensing/ http://www.imdb.com/licensing/
nishonia 12y ago
I used IMDB several years ago, but now see that their usage policy is restricted to "personal" use. Who is going to download 1.11 GB of compressed text for personal use? http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces
johns 12y ago
http://www.omdbapi.com/ http://www.omdbapi.com/ http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/ http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  +1 on rottentomatoes. easy to get an API key with reasonable rate limits for free, and the API has a decent fuzzy search. (you might have to do some fiddling with the results, but what you're looking for is usually there)
toast0 12y ago
Related, if someone knows of an API to get commercial links (buy/rent) from tmdb or imdb ids, it would be useful for me.

Animats 12y ago

APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service. Google once allowed search queries via a SOAP interface. That's gone. They also dropped RSS feeds. But the API for submitting paid ads, that works. The paid cloud services are fine. Twitter doesn't like third party Twitter clients any more and will pull the API key of anyone who writes one. A third party client might have a spam ("sponsored tweet") filter.

x0x0 12y ago
Twitter is back to trying to lure developers in; there will be another batch of whiny posts in 2 years when they pull the rug out from this new set. Devs should stop playing charlie brown.
- msie 12y ago
  Did I miss something? What has Twitter done lately for devs?
  - wahnfrieden 12y ago
    https://dev.twitter.com/ https://dev.twitter.com/
    - msie 12y ago
      Yeah, that's a joke. What developers really care about is Twitter's API.
      - AznHisoka 12y ago
        I agree. Nobody cares about Fabric. Who cares if it goes down, your business won't die. If their API dies, you can bet a whole lot of companies and their employees are basically screwed. Hootsuite, Adobe Marketing Cloud, BrandWatch, Buffer, Salesforce, SimplyMeasured, Oracle marketing cloud, etc, etc.
12y ago

LukeB_UK 12y ago

They announced the retirement 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171

johns 12y ago
Announced 18 months ago: http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public_API_Program http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public...

teacup50 12y ago

In case this wasn't obvious to you, Netflix is not the internet's friend, fun examples include: - Browser DRM (making it impossible to produce a fully functional AND open source browser) - HDCP-for-sockets (e.g., to replace HTTPS with something they can tie to platform DRM-protected key exchange -- http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m...) ... and now this.

Karunamon 12y ago
Thank the studios for most of this - they will not allow their content to be distributed without encumberance. Even if that somehow makes them evil (or insert other derogatory words here), their assistance in the fight for net neutrality makes them very much "the internet's friend", IMO. FWIW, I find it very hard to get outraged about DRM when it comes to streaming services - the usual "fair use" things that DRM usually inhibits does not do so in the context of streaming. The only thing you can't do with an encrypted stream that you can do with an unencrypted one is record it, and you agreed not to do that when you signed up for Netflix anyways. In other words, you're getting exactly what you pay for with the service: Ephemeral, on-demand streams of content.
- teacup50 12y ago
  > ... the usual "fair use" things that DRM usually inhibits does not do so in the context of streaming. Sure they do. Video rentals were based on the first-sale doctrine[1]; the video store bought the movie, the video store rented their copy to you, and you could play it on any device that was technologically capable. There was no end-to-end control over the production, distribution, and viewing pipeline: - Anyone could run a video rental store. - Anyone could develop and sell a VCR. - Consumers could watch the movies in any way they wanted, with any device they wanted, rented or purchased from any store their wanted. With DRM, that healthy competitive market has been collapsed down into: - Content distributors must license the media specifically for digital distribution, granting full control to the content owners (and increasingly are the content owners) - Only playback devices that are approved by the content distributors may be used. If you think Netflix is your friend because they support net neutrality, consider what it means when the distribution mechanisms for the content you might like to consume over that internet (apps, games, music, movies) are far from "neutral". Netflix — and other companies — don't simply want to be the pipes, any more than Comcast wants to be a commodity pipe. If they fight for net neutrality, that's a happy accident of their own commercial interests, but we'll have even less choice and competition than when we started if the Netflixs simply replace the Comcasts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

mynegation 12y ago

At least these news reminded me that I wanted to pull the plug on the membership for a long time, so I just did that. Not in the protest but because selection (in Canada at least) is abysmal. I wonder how many people relied on 3rd party software to manage and view their Netflix and whether it causeS number of cancellations to be big enough for them to notice.

notastartup 12y ago

This is why I see the trouble with the semantic web. If even large guys like Netflix are unwilling to share their API publicly then semantic web becomes something like a really expensive toy that people with very large pockets can afford or you end up scraping everyone to death. This is why I think strategies like Kimono and Import.io will fail.

walterbell 12y ago
Unless we move to open public metadata for common needs, with optional private annotations for those who can afford toys. A possible role model is Apple's support of OpenStreetMap as a defensive response to Google Maps, which has improved the quality of open GIS data.

saurik 12y ago

I do not understand the backend reason for this (and did not when I saw the announcements about this two years ago): while I can see not wanting to provide a full movie metadata API, having "is this or is this not available on Netflix right now" seems like a really important API to have, one that allows websites people use to browse and find movies to funnel users into Netflix (and seems a natural fit for their very popular affiliate program). Apple actually provides massive database dumps of everything available in iTunes, for free, to anyone who asks, which is why virtually every music discovery site or app has a "buy this on iTunes" button, not just "a small set of developers whose applications have proven to be the most valuable for many of our members" (which is a quote from the Netflix developer blog earlier this year; you have to pull this from Google Cache now, sadly). I don't see how "stream/rent this on Netflix" is a bad thing for Netflix (but am totally willing to believe I am not "seeing far enough", because this is not my area of expertise, hence why I am asking this question: I hope to be enlightened ;P). (edit:) I guess maybe for the same reason Uber and Lyft don't want APIs? Because they want to dominate the end user searching and discovery experience as well? But like, even Walmart and Amazon offer APIs... ;P.

drawkbox 12y ago
I agree it is shortsighted. It is probably a business decision to 'own the data' and control the storefront/display for margins. However not realizing that the data/api part is what helped them along in the first place and all this means is they lose control of the data. Cutting off the API does nothing to stop scraping which will happen more now and not funneled into a controlled/throttled/tracked usage of that data. Worst for Netflix is that other competing services will own more and more data instead of relying on theirs. Another streaming service could come along with that type of developer love again and catch Netflix high centered. This is a very business over technology/open decision here for a Netflix that has moved away from developer support with things like the Netflix Prize, that time is done and over. The argument of public vs private api usage that Netflix states how public api is only 0.3% is not valid because most public api usage just pulls data to cache and rarely hits the endpoint where private apis they use constantly track progress/settings/state etc.
clinth 12y ago

fragmede 12y ago

What the name for when a company seems to have stagnated, based on the lack of change in their front-end, even though you're sure there're engineers diligently toiling away at things? Netflix's frontend has not have any real improvement in quite a while. "Share on Facebook"? "Kids Mode"? "Watched by Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)"? C'mon! Where's the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB integration? Why does their search still have zero options to help you search? Where's Netflix's rendition of A Better Queue or Instant Watcher? The shutting down of the public API wouldn't be such a big deal if they paid more attention to their frontend. It also seems that Netflix thinks that if they don't bring up the fact that there are movies that aren't on Netflix, we won't notice. The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. I know there are engineers there working on hard problems (the scale they operate on is amazing) but in the midst of the current mobile and UX revolution, all they've manged to do is add a frame around the results page so it's easier to search again? OKCupid is another site that comes to mind where it looks like the front end is just stuck and has stopped progressing. (Gmail gets a pass because Google just gave up and made Inbox instead.)

saraid216 12y ago
> The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. Last I heard (and this was years ago), the crap UX is an intentional design decision from the top. I can't say that about Google or Netflix, but AFAIK with Craigslist, they're deliberately not trying to make the UX modern.
sjs382 12y ago
The lack of frontend innovation might have something to do with the sheer number of native clients for different platforms. Software fragmentation can be a bitch...
- benologist 12y ago
  Random missing features on every platform are also Netflix's fault. Whose else would it be?
maxmcd 12y ago
Why are new features and change inherently a good thing? In my experience building consumer products "feature creep", and "unnecessary complexity" are the enemy. Not lack of features and frequent updates.

jellicle 12y ago

Too bad, since there's basically no way to find what good content Netflix has using their inferior tools. From accounts which are permanently contaminated by kid shows (let your kid watch a few shows, you'll never get anything except cartoons recommended ever again, irreversible, no way to edit or start over) to discovery algorithms that just give you the same five shows (that you've already watched, on Netflix) over and over...

jaredsohn 12y ago
> irreversible, no way to edit or start over As of a few months ago, you can now remove titles from your viewing history. http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films-or-shows-from-your-ac-1633561640 http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films-or-s...

joshuak 12y ago

So now sort by recommendation ranking is truly gone even via other websites, along with Netflix being eliminated from data search such as apps that help you find where a show is available to watch (legally) across all services? Wow. I do not get this at all. I can't quite understand why so many big services avoid obvious features related to ranking and discovery. Is it because they've found that people just burn through their top 10% of recommended content, and then quit the service? This seems hard to believe. Is there some other reason I'm missing? I've been calling this "value evasion" to refer to obvious features that are consistently avoided by many top web services, and working to understand what the point of hiding that functionality is for a while now. There must be really clear reasoning as to why it's a bad idea, but I have to admit I'm stumped.