This is a very cathartic read, and a great web site. Only thing I fear is traditional businesses will try to shut it down, and there are many ways to do that.
I dunno, this presupposes that maintainers of existing cinema listing websites make money off the sites, as opposed to making money off people finding the movies they want to see, and visiting the cinema. But you’re probably correct in that you cannot underestimate the stupidity of incumbents.
As an aside, I recently visited the cinema for the first time in a long time here in Sweden, and the screen was showing some sort of simple memory card game you were supposed to play with your phone (prizes were in-cinema snack gift cards). This was before the 10-15m of normal ads as well as trailers for upcoming movies. I think the margins in cinema are super-thin right now.
I think the margins for theaters have always been super low. Apparently a high percentage of ticket sales are sent directly to the distributor the first week then it drops as time goes on
This reminds me of wotif.com, which used to present a nice table of accommodation options as rows and dates as columns, and you could really easily find something that worked for you by exploring different options (across different dates and providers).
Then it got bought by booking.com (I believe) and they deleted all of that good stuff and deployed a booking.com clone site on the domain. Was a real shame.
I also dream about doing something like this for Italian cinemas (or at least those in my town). The problem is the availability of this data. I found the agency that aggregates this data from cinemas and sells it to the big websites in the form of a JSON API, but the costs of the service are not listed and I’m afraid it’s gonna be prohibitively expensive.
To anyone who cares, I signed up for a 30 day trial of the API and built a client for it. I think I’ll be splitting the thing into a timer job that fetches data a couple of times a day and stores it to a SQLite db, and a small backend that takes that SQLite DB and some query parameters, and returns either JSON or HTML directly.
Terms of service and pricing of the API are still unclear to me so I guess I’ll contact the agency directly. I hope it’s not too bad :P
Very cool concept, and I love the simplicity. Does anyone know if the source is available?
Garden
This is a side note, but it’s unfortunate that the name of the PaaS collides with the CSS tool, also in the Clojure ecosystem. But it looks awesome nonetheless.
Way more websites should be like this.
This is a very cathartic read, and a great web site. Only thing I fear is traditional businesses will try to shut it down, and there are many ways to do that.
I dunno, this presupposes that maintainers of existing cinema listing websites make money off the sites, as opposed to making money off people finding the movies they want to see, and visiting the cinema. But you’re probably correct in that you cannot underestimate the stupidity of incumbents.
As an aside, I recently visited the cinema for the first time in a long time here in Sweden, and the screen was showing some sort of simple memory card game you were supposed to play with your phone (prizes were in-cinema snack gift cards). This was before the 10-15m of normal ads as well as trailers for upcoming movies. I think the margins in cinema are super-thin right now.
I think the margins for theaters have always been super low. Apparently a high percentage of ticket sales are sent directly to the distributor the first week then it drops as time goes on
This reminds me of wotif.com, which used to present a nice table of accommodation options as rows and dates as columns, and you could really easily find something that worked for you by exploring different options (across different dates and providers).
Then it got bought by booking.com (I believe) and they deleted all of that good stuff and deployed a booking.com clone site on the domain. Was a real shame.
I also dream about doing something like this for Italian cinemas (or at least those in my town). The problem is the availability of this data. I found the agency that aggregates this data from cinemas and sells it to the big websites in the form of a JSON API, but the costs of the service are not listed and I’m afraid it’s gonna be prohibitively expensive.
To anyone who cares, I signed up for a 30 day trial of the API and built a client for it. I think I’ll be splitting the thing into a timer job that fetches data a couple of times a day and stores it to a SQLite db, and a small backend that takes that SQLite DB and some query parameters, and returns either JSON or HTML directly.
Terms of service and pricing of the API are still unclear to me so I guess I’ll contact the agency directly. I hope it’s not too bad :P
Very cool concept, and I love the simplicity. Does anyone know if the source is available?
This is a side note, but it’s unfortunate that the name of the PaaS collides with the CSS tool, also in the Clojure ecosystem. But it looks awesome nonetheless.
I’d love to see some filter options so I can easily see all the showings that are relevant to me:
Okay, am I missing a joke with the second cursor, or is it just supposed to be an annoying prank?
(I otherwise think the page is very cool)
the multiple cursors are part of some form of pointer tracking in the javascript on the page