NC

This week has been Young Rewired State week. At YRS i-DAT in Plymouth, we’ve had a team of five working on an tool to give you suggestions on what to do if you were bored, all based upon your location.

Among lots of other data sources, they wanted a way to get nearby cinemas and the times of films which were showing there. After a quick hunt around for different sources, it looked a bit bleak. Back in 2009, Yahoo had a movies API. Google had one too as part of iGoogle, but that went when iGoogle was shut down.

Then I came across Find any Film. The first reference I could find for it was a 2009 Guardian article, explaining how the UK Film Council had launched the site, and it mentioned that: “an API will also be rolled out that will allow developers to build applications around this unique and rich data set. ‘We’ll be thinking carefully about the best way of doing that.’”. Sadly, it looks like this never happened.

So, I took it upon myself to screenscrape Find any Film and spit out JSON formatted data that could be reused by our YRS team. That became moviesapi.

It’s a small collection of Ruby, with the parsing handled by Nokogiri and the API implemented using Sinatra. It’s very similar to my last screenscraping project, UrbanScraper.

As it is now, it implements the ability to find cinemas based on a postcode and to find out the show times today at a given cinema. This was just enough to get it working for the team, but I’ll probably add more functionality later on.

At some point, I need to add some tests¹, and it would be nice to run it through Travis too. Additionally, some caching (probably using Redis) would be good — the requests are quite slow and don’t change all that often.

The legal status of this data is a little complex. As far as I can understand, any user (including me, and then you using the API) would be bound by the Find any Film Terms and Conditions which says that you cannot use the data commercially along with a bunch of other things. It’d be nice if people would just share this kind of data, but that’s another complex argument. I’m of the opinion that I’ll continue to run such a thing (doing as much as I can to stop Find any Film being abused by caching at my end) until I’m told otherwise.

Anyway, the source is on GitHub and the live API is hosted on Heroku.