Great job! I've long wanted to work on this problem because I think there's so much more that can be done. You definitely seem headed in the right direction.
1. I want to follow all my favorite movie-makers and actors and get an email every time they make something new.
2. I want to go through all the movies they've made that I missed.
3. I want to discover new great people to follow by finding great movies.
I'm in the same boat, I was always looking for a way to get notifications when a new movie from a certain director or with actors I like is available, get a list with all the movies they were starring in or just get notifications if a movie produced in a certain country is available.
Ironically the solution which works best are the notification settings from Gazelle [0] based private movie trackers.
I blame the lack of sites offering this feature on the very restrictive IMDB API which isn't exactly fun to work with and expensive to get access to if you don't want to work with a dump which doesn't even include the latest data.
Obviously a good UI and everything. I would suggest adding rating as an PG, R, etc as another filter. Also if there was some way to integrate with netflix and filter out all the movies I have already seen from my watched list. There should be a third party provider that keeps track of watched movies/tv shows and your ratings for them that could provide an api to the likes of netflix and anyone else that wanted it. The problem with sites like this is like 95% of the results fall into the category of I have seen it or I already know about it and don't want to see it. An app that could accurately show me movies I haven't seen or heard of that I would actually want to see would be so incredibly useful.
Love how the frontend is implemented. It's also quite snappy. I've recently watched a tutorial on neo4j where they used this kind of app as an example. Is it built on top of a graph database?
One odd thing I noticed is how the actors seem to be ordered alphabetically starting with special chars. I'd fill all the tabs that have word values with the most popular/relevant ones as a default/starting point. Search results might also have a count (like Google for example) so users have a clue through how many pages they have to click.
If you like hacking on this sort of thing with a much larger dataset (hundreds of thousands of movies / millions of episodes) across dozens of streaming, dvd, vod, ratings, etc sources please reach out -- ablohowiak@fan.tv . You can see our current implementation of this on the iPad app under "smart browse". We're starting to work on our next implementation of smart browse soon.
Our problem is also fun because we integrate with MVPDs (like Time Warner Cable) and unify streaming/live/on-demand in one set-top box.
Neat - for my personal tastes, I've found that I only trust IMDB ratings and anything in the near the 7.5 range regardless of vote count - always hunting the missed movies. But can't find something like this:
Searching on a rating of 7-8 and Johnnie To even if I put in 1-3K votes matching the imbd count. Which, btw, someone uploads to youtube every few weeks.
I did have one super minor moment of confusion. I'm on iOS 7 on an iPhone 5. I tapped "genre" then "action," and then my choice appeared at the bottom of my screen in the white triangle. I did not realize there was more content if I scrolled down the page, so I was confused why nothing changed except the appearance of my choice.
So I would recommend finding a way to make it clear scrolling is available if you can't tell.
Just excellent.
Great user interface, simple and efficient.
What is the rating and vote count based on?
IMDB? RottenTomatoes?
Maybe an option to sort the list would be useful.
Edit:
The search for key words work a bit unexpected.
Typing a title, for example "Things We Lost in the Fire", returns many seemingly random movies, but not the movie actually named "Things We Lost in the Fire"
Maybe a sort based on the Levenshtein distance could be used to sort the result when seraching on key words?
FYI I looked for the top documentaries on Amazon (Rating 9-10). Saw Africa. Clicked the Amazon link. It took me to the wrong Amazon link for a different Africa:
http://www.amazon.com/Africa-Greg-Wise/dp/B00B99QINY
EDIT - Seeing the same issue with other Amazon links.
This is fantastic. Really creative UI. I've already found several movies to add to my Amazon/Netflix watch list that I didn't even know existed.
Is there any way to sign up? I'd love to use it for movie wish lists and taste profile that auto-recommends. Otherwise, I may forget about the site (busy, etc etc).
This (multi-dimensional filter/search) is what I've been hoping IMDB would do for the last 5 years (and amazed they hadn't). Thank you, this is awesome, and an easy bookmark for a completionist. Although it weirds me out how much of the 7-10 sci-fi list I've seen.
Wonderful interface (once I realized that I was supposed to scroll down for the results).
The only parameter I'm missing is what country the film is from. British crime movies are my favorite, and I'd love to be able to filter it down to the UK.
Where are you getting your data from? It seems like you're running into problems with new shows/shows that share the same name as movies. For instance Utopia (UK sci-fi/thriller/mystery) or Fargo (TV show).
Feature request: filter by released on dvd/bluray.
I'm not a big fan of going to the cinemas, so its good to see what's available to watch from home. Netflix and Amazon streaming aren't everything!
Cool. Would love to use something like this to see what service I can use to watch it. Finding a movie is hard enough, it would be nice to have help finding how to watch it at the same time.
This is great until it sells out to Amazon like IMDB or Goodreads. The problem isn't the interface. The problem is our relationship with our own data. It's no longer ours.
this is great! one suggestion would be to update the suggestions under each filter type based on the current search results. for example, say i'm interested in Sean Connery movies. now that i see the results, it'd be nice to further filter the results by rating, director, etc. the directors tab would show all unique directors appearing in the current search result set.
maybe there's a better UX paradigm for this drill-down approach, but i think it would be a great addition.
I'd love to know how you got the initial data on your servers. Did you just do a massive API scrape of IMDB, Amazon, Netflix etc? How do you keep it up to date?
I was contemplating working on something similar due to my frustration with not remembering which episode I watched last of something, thanks!
[Edit] The website has "keep track of all the movies and TV series you have seen" in the list of features but I wasn't able to add a show and check off episodes as I expected when I read that.
If you have an Android phone I'll suggest you to try the app called Series Guide: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.battlelanc...
I use it exactly for that purpose.
According to the page you can sync the info with https://trakt.tv/ (so maybe you're more interested in it than the app) but I found the app really handy, you finish an episode and you flag it on the app, that's it!
Interesting service, but your UX could be better on big screens (haven't tested on phone/tablet). I click on one of the tabs like Genre or Year and I'm presented with the 1500+ pixels wide hodgepodge of tags. It's very hard to read and puts a lot of mental strain on visitor to scan through that list of tags and find the one of interest.
1. I want to follow all my favorite movie-makers and actors and get an email every time they make something new.
2. I want to go through all the movies they've made that I missed.
3. I want to discover new great people to follow by finding great movies.
In order of importance, for me.
Good luck!