This just means more people will rely on covertly scraping their data. It also means, much like Twitter and the way they nerfed their developer ecosystem, Netflix will gain much more control over any available 3rd party offerings (as they've clearly outlined). Seems like a very short-sighted trade off if you ask me, but, hey, maybe the public API was just underused and they didn't want to devote more resources to maintaining it.
NFLX would prefer we not measure their offerings against AMZN's. That's what I think, anyway. Amazon has more headliners than they know what to do with - they rotate them on and off Prime's frontpage regularly enough to give the impression you'll never watch all of it. Netflix, on the other hand... Netflix and I fought an 18-month staring contest over whether I was going to watch The Lincoln Lawyer.
I don't think that's the case as they are allowing Can I Stream It? to stay up which is specifically for seeing what streaming services (including Amazon) offer particular titles.
Netflix was my first introduction to webscraping back around 2004 (with Perl and WWW::Mechanize) because they didn't see the need for an API. They've never done anything more than pay lip service to it since they finally caved in and made one. Guess it's back to doing that, or using an alternative like TheMovieDB [1], which has a nice API.
You might be interested in a tool I wrote called goim[1], which is a command + library (written in Go) that loads all of IMDb into either a PostgreSQL or SQLite database. (It takes about 12 minutes for the download and loading of the database from scratch on my personal machine.) It supports complex queries (with fuzzy matching) really easily on the command line. For example, this will find the top 5 ranked Simpsons episodes with "homer" in the title:
And if you're like me and rip episodes off your Simpsons DVDs that are named "S04E12.mkv", then you can rename all of them in one swoop:
goim rename -tv 'the simpsons' *.mkv
It will automatically find the `S04E12` in the file names to get the correspondence between episodes.
Of course, the database has more than Simpsons episodes in it (and renaming works with movies too), but it's my go-to example. :-)
Want to try it out? It's easy. Make sure you have Go installed, then install and load and search:
go get github.com/BurntSushi/goim # ~ 30 seconds (compiles SQLite)
goim load -db goim.sqlite # ~ 1 minute, only movies/tv shows
goim search -db goim.sqlite '%homer%' {show:the simpsons}
Loading/searching is a bit slower with SQLite than with PostgreSQL, but it's more convenient. (e.g., The search command above is over 12x faster with PostgreSQL on my system.)
