Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review
Reel in a Netflix movie with the ezMoviePick app
I am a huge movie fan and have been a customer of Netflix since they opened for business. I would say that I average over 200 movies a year delivered to me in red envelopes, so I was quite excited when ezMoviePick $0.99US [iTunes Link] was released. This app, which works with any iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or better, is a Netflix queue manager and movie selector rolled into one, so I had to check it out and see if if it could replace a few other Netflix apps like PhoneFlicks, that I have been using for some time, along with uncovering some worthy movies that I've missed. Movie selection is at the heart of the app. It looks and works similarly to Urbanspoon taking the form of a slot machine. After entering your Netflix account information and choosing which formats of movies (DVD, Blu Ray, Watch Instantly) you are interested in, you tap a key or shake your device to set three wheels spinning. The wheels are for movie type, year of release and number of stars. The result -- after waiting a bit longer than I would have preferred -- is a nearly random selection. Any movies shown will be from the list of films that Netflix would recommend to you. You can tap on a resulting film it to get some information and have the opportunity to add any of your chosen formats to your queue.
The problem is that you can't lock a reel or two as you can with Urbanspoon, so there is no way to concentrate your searches based on any criteria. You get what you get. This is not an oversight in the building of the app though. The Netflix API, according to the developer, makes such a lock virtually impossible:
"Netflix does not offer an API that will let a third party do a request asking for : give me all movies in the category "Comedy" from the 90's, or all movies with at least 3 stars in the Thriller category. Thus because of that limitation, the application right now cannot provide a 'lock' feature."
There may be a way around this in the future, but for now any solution would be quite time consuming as ezMoviePick would have to load in 2000-3000 movies on startup, slowing things down to an unreasonable level.
The result is that movie selection is really nothing more than a novelty since I'm not interested in any movies with less than four stars. Using a five star rating system, ⅗ of the results I would get are nothing I would be interested in. It's fun playing with for a while, but it's really not all that useful for me.
The queue management part of the app gives you the basics but not as much as can be found in other apps such as PhoneFlicks. ezMoviePick allows you to view your physical movie queue as two sections. The first is: Available Now Delivered by Netflix, which shows your movies in the proper queue order and allows you to move a film's position or to delete it from your queue. The second is: Saved for later - Delivered by Netflix. This shows your list of films that haven't been released yet. What you don't get is any indication of movies in your queue that Netflix doesn't have on hand. So anything with a wait on it is not shown in this app. You can also see your list of movies that can be watched instantly.
I'm sure that later versions will incorporate other commonly found features such as viewing your recent activity and searching for individual movies. But for now, it does give you simple queue management features and the novelty of its design.
I do wonder, with the developers knowing the limitations of the Netflix API, why ezMoviePick was designed as a slot machine. As a simple queue manager it's fine, but as way to pick movies, not so much. However, I would change my opinion on a dime if a usable way to lock reels could be found.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Oscar said 7:20PM on 12-03-2009
I prefer the more refined UI and pretty icon of iPhlix.
http://iphonevine.com/iflix2/
Reply
Prometheus25 said 8:52PM on 12-03-2009
I agree, and the developer's a real stand up guy as well, although I may be a little bit biased :)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphlix-netflix-queue-manager/id287644896?mt=8
hmlong said 8:55PM on 12-03-2009
Getting ready to stop NetFlix. They refuse to buy a sufficient number of DVDs to meet demand, and every movie in my queue is listed as "Long Wait" or "Very Long Wait".
Reply
fishbert said 9:31PM on 12-03-2009
Can't implement locks?! I call BS on that one.
If Netflix's API won't let you specify a category, why not just keep re-running the "spin" function (behind the scenes, of course) until the API returns something that fits? Wouldn't that be the same thing as locking categories?
Reply
Erick said 11:38PM on 12-03-2009
That would likely be against the terms of the API.
My suggestion as an iPhone developer would be to temporarily stor. Them in a db on a host and sort them there but it's more infrastructure than what they want to mess with.