Netflix API Developer Blog
Announcing the OData Catalog API Preview!
The Netflix Catalog API provides rich information on over 100,000 movies and actors, but you can only retrieve its data by searching for movie title terms or actor names, or by downloading our multi-megabyte catalog index and putting it into a database to enable richer queries. What if you don't want to run your own database, but really need to find "movies available for instant watching released in the last two weeks in the anime genre that have greater than a 3 star average rating"?
OData to the Rescue
I'm happy to announce the availability of the Netflix OData Catalog API Preview. OData is an open protocol used to describe web-based data sources in a consistent way, enabling integration across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools. For example, at today's Microsoft MIX developer conference, they demonstrated using the Catalog within Visual Studio 2010. OData enabled:
- a schema view of the catalog illustrating the relationships between data entities
- a SQL-like language for creating rich queries against the catalog, and including only the data items you want in the results
- Intellisense IDE support, providing just-in-time help for building queries dynamically within the Visual Studio editor
We're initially rolling this out as a "Preview" as we want your feedback about how this API works before we finalize it. This means that the API might change in the future, but we'll be sure to give you advance notice before we start changing things. Please let us know what you think about the API in this blog or in the forum.
One last bit of good news, during the Preview this API is being made available without OAuth authentication and without rate limits. Now that you can access the Catalog more easily than ever before, we're really excited to see what you'll create! Check out the API documentation to get started. Kent has also built the beginning of a query builder.
13 Comments
eddiewebb – 2 years ago
This looks awesome, and seems like a great solution to our need to query the catalog.
Did UPC not make the cut? IN addition to searching by genre, format, etc, my users want to scan and add movies they see in a store.
Kirsten Jones – 2 years ago
Eddie,
We'll get UPC in there shortly. Thanks for the feedback :-)
Kirsten
CMHDave – 2 years ago
I'm trying to cook up a query with a time format but can't figure out the proper syntax. Could you provide an example in the documentation? (Like the above referenced query of finding a title released in the last two weeks)
Daryl Spitzer – 2 years ago
CMHDave,
See the Edm.DateTime primitive type in http://www.odata.org/developers/protocols/overview. For example, this query works for me:
http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/CatalogTitles?$filter=Instant/AvailableFrom%20eq%20datetime'2010-03-16'&$format=json
--
Daryl
CMHDave – 2 years ago
Much thanks Daryl! Works like a charm
Raj R – 2 years ago
this is simply great
nlnd89 – 2 years ago
Wow this is awesome. Thank you so much
nlnd89 – 2 years ago
Wow this is awesome. Thank you so much
Fabrice Marguerie – 2 years ago
The Sesame Data Browser has been updated with improved support for OData, which results in a richer experience with the Netflix OData Catalog.
See http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2010/04/17/sesame-odata-browser-updated.aspx
Let me know what you think.
Fabrice Marguerie
http://twitter.com/metaSesame
http://metaSapiens.com
Paul Sanders – 2 years ago
Drat, I was really hoping for UPC too. I'll be looking forward to it!
Sam Matthews – 2 years ago
I built a desktop app that lets you query the Netflix catalog. Check it out at : http://www.netflixsupersearch.blogspot.com/
Bakodo – 2 years ago
Search by UPC would be so good. Searching another site for the title from UPC, then searching by title on netflix and cross referencing with the upc is clearly less than ideal. Looking forward to UPC.
Softmod Wii 4.3E – 5 days ago
I agree with Bakodo. Searching the title from another site would be so cool.
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