Google discontinued google.com/movies...

[dreieinhalb]

I noticed today that Google decided to discontinue http://www.google.com/movies/ on 1 November. I think this is a very bad decision, because it was a very good overview for the cinema program over a whole city/region. I used Google movies on desktop as well as on mobile phone with the great butaca app for the N9. Do you know if there are out any alternatives? Will butaca ever work again?

[spenap]

Hi Dominik,

Thanks for your words about Butaca :)

I am not too optimistic about Google Movies: when I added support for it to the project, I spent quite some time looking for a Movie Showtimes API that could be used, and couldn't find anything, so this might be the end of movie showtime support. However, as you might have seen, @mporsch has been the main contributor to the project since 2014, so he might have something different to say.

[dreieinhalb]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for you prompt answer ;).

It would be interesting to know where Google got the data for Google Movies. Did the cinema operators report them directly to Google or to another service? Or did Google fetch it from every cinema website (hardly probable). I'm not sure how it worked, but it worked very good and for almost all cinemas (even the very small independent art theaters). Maybe @mporsch knows something about. I hope so.

[dreieinhalb]

I did some further research on my own. I contacted an operator of a small cinema in my city. He was very open and gave me some 'insider information'. He said, they deliver the data to some different service provider. But in his opinion, Krankikom is in Germany the biggest provider (almost kind of monopolist) and probably Google gets their data from there. He also said this companies will grant access to the data but sure not for free. I asked how the data gets to a service provider and he answered that they send a pdf of an excel sheet, and maybe some students do a hard typing job.

[spenap]

This is quite interesting, but unfortunately... doesn't give us much hope. In the past, printed newspapers used to have this information available. Maybe the digital versions do it too, but then... it would require some plugin mechanism where one would only fetch the showtimes for a given area by combining plugins... Imagine the amount of work!

[mporsch]

It's a pity google shut down the service. As long as there is no comparable alternative, I am afraid the function will stay dead.
At least butaca degraded gracefully (not crashing); so I see no urge for cutting out the corresponding code and pushing an update.