Movie Show Times Service for a City Newspaper

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trevorkjorlien's picture

Hey all,

I've seen a few services on the web that offer a widget or plugin to a web site to automatically populate the show times for a particular area. Fandango, to mention one.

The newspaper site I'm building needs to have film listings available on it, and currently, all we are doing is copying and pasting the show times from our paper into our CMS (non-Drupal as of now), and we need to update those same files each week for the films coming up. Ya, not a classy way to show events.

While I've read topics on Drupal to make a custom content type/view/calendar for custom theatre show times, there's simply too many theaters in our city to make this manageable each week.

Has anybody found/used a web service that automatically populate movie show times based on a single area/city for a Drupal site?

Also, I've found that Google does have show times data available, but no open API to access it (as far as I can see). Here's the link - it's actually really simple: http://www.google.com/movies?sc=1&near=new+york&rl=1

Think there could be any way via XML or something else and parse that data into a Drupal site?

Thanks for any help.

Comments

iSnoop.net / Tribune Media Services

trevorkjorlien's picture

OK, so I've done some searching around and found a few options:

1. iSnoop.net: Favorite Theatre RSS Generator

Apparently Google has a showtimes service at http://www.google.com/movies. Very simple and just the info we're looking for. What iSnoop does is lets you put in the city/postal code and creates an RSS feed for each theatre in that area. Very cool, although I'd need to find a way to implement it into our Drupal site (I'm by no means a hardcore programmer).

The drawback here is that if Google changes the way they present movies, this method could be fracked. Also, there might be legal issues with using the content for free.

2. Tribune Media Services

I looked at other sites, like Fandango and apparently they don't create the listings themselves. Actually, most if not all ticketing services don't. Fandango gets all that info from Tribune Media Services (http://tms.tribune.com/products/i-internet.html).

I talked on the phone with a representative and apparently, at least here in Canada, they offer an XML feed for $0.25 per screen per week. In our case, it comes to $29.00 per week to get a hold of that info (116 screens in our area). That includes showtimes, ratings, and locations, although more info is available for a higher cost.

So this post doesn't give any technical information (yet) in how to implement film listings, but merely WHERE to get the data, which was a huge hurdle for me.

Interesting

Michelle's picture

Movie listings is something I would like on my site. I can't imagine we have more than 10 theaters in the area so I might be able to afford it if they're willing to deal with a small fry like me. Thanks for getting that far. Hopefully someone will be able to take it all the way to a Drupal module.

Michelle


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Movie Showtimes API

MackPoone's picture

Here is the link to one of the showtime API's I found and use:

www.ignyte.com/webservices/commercial/WhatsShowingWebservice1.0/MovieInf...

Here is the page that describes the service:

http://www.ignyte.com/services-web-services.html