Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Blockbuster vs Netflix (How IMDB can help)


I have been a Netflix customer for many customers.  I am also a frustrated customer -- reason being its becoming harder and harder to find the movies that I like to watch and that have a good rating as well.  My biggest pain point is that Netflix doesn't allow me to search movies by rating. Moreover, I think their collection no longer rocks. My frustration causes me naturally to look sideways for alternatives.

Welcome Blockbuster (willing to give them another chance).

To me, collection of good movies is the top criteria but sadly there is no quick and easy way to find out which company has more collection and also that of good movies. To qualify what is a good movie, I think IMDB movie rating can serve as a good indicator. So I am trying to find out following:

1)  How many % of IMDB movies does Netflix and Blockbuster have (Coverage)
2)  How many % of IMDB movies with rating > 6 does Netflix and Blockbuster have (Good movie coverage)
3)  How many 2012 movies Netflix/Blockbuster have (New movie coverage)

Simple questions but to find the answers, I will have to resort to my favorite past time programming -- web scripting using wget/perl/grep/ etc.

Let me know what you think of this problem and if you are interested to see the results,

Cheers,

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about integrating rotten tomatoes API w/ Netflix/BB?

Not sure if you're aware of this but definitely RT is well reputed in the market, especially for rating movies.

check this out...

http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/

Sandeep said...

Dear anonymous,

RT is definitely a consideration. I just wanted to use one independent parameter (IMDB) to differentiate between blockbuster and Netflix...

I feel that consumers today don't have an "objective" way of differentiating between the two and I was hoping to shed some light on that.

Thanks for your comment though,