Deciding what film to watch with APIs and Ruby

As part of my Sky taxsubscription, I get Anytime+, a video-on-demand (VOD) service that gives you access to hundreds of films for download over the internet. Sky’s set-top box shows you a selection of what’s available grouped into genres and the website lists them alphabetically.

The problem is deciding what to watch. I can Google the name of each film from the big list and check the individual ratings on a movie website, but there’s just too many to choose from. I may waste an evening on the sofa with Vampires Suck and miss out on Raging Bull. What I need is a way of ranking these films so that I can cherrypick the best.

Anytom is my hacker’s solution. It’s a set of scripts that scrapes Sky’s public film list, queries the Rotten Tomatoes API for critics’ ratings, running times, year and synopsis and displays each in ratings order. I can then find the hidden gems and ignore the dross.

I’m using hpricot to parse Sky’s HTML and Rotten Tomatoes’ API to get the ratings and other data for each of the films. Sinatra serves up the list in rankings order and Ruby glues it all together.

UPDATE: Try out the deployed version or check out the source on GitHub.

The name? ANYtime rotten TOMatoes.