Member Avatar for stupidenator

Hi everyone,
I am trying to make a web site feature that will display accurate movie theatre showtimes. The problem I am having is that I am not sure how I can get these times. I know sites like google and yahoo can look them up for my local theatres and tell me what time movies are playing at. Does anyone know how to retrieve that information? I was thinking there was something like an rss feed, but I have been unable to find anything googling it.
Thanks for any help in advance.

Nick

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Member #114696

Dani AI

Generated

Short practical guide for based on the replies from , and .

Showtime data is treated as commercial content by chains and aggregators, so the realistic routes are licensing, partnering, or collecting it directly rather than relying on an open RSS. Practical options to explore:

  • License or subscribe to a commercial showtime provider (examples: MovieGlu or Gracenote) — these services supply normalized schedules and theatre IDs and are built for redistribution (MovieGlu , Gracenote).
  • Integrate with ticketing partners or exhibitor feeds. Large chains often supply data to partners or will accept integration deals; for small independents, offer a simple admin portal so they can post their own times.
  • Use place-finding services (e.g., the Google Places API) to discover theatre locations and canonical addresses, then attach licensed showtime data to those POIs (Google Places API).
  • If you cannot license data, build a unique site around local curation and value (reviews, alerts, timetable views) instead of trying to clone Google’s UX — this improves stickiness as suggested.

Implementation tips: normalize movie titles to a canonical ID (IMDb or TMDb) to avoid duplicates; store showtimes in UTC with theatre-local timezone metadata; cache aggressively (minutes, not hours) to avoid stale listings; always show “times subject to change” and include links to buy tickets. For metadata and canonical IDs, the TMDb API is a useful free resource for matching titles (TMDb API).

Legal/operational caution: do not scrape other sites without checking their terms and robots rules — scraping can be blocked or have legal consequences; consult the robots.txt standard and each site’s terms before automating (robots.txt standard).

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for TheNNS

I think that you need google's permission for that.

Member Avatar for intiendes

If your taking info from other sites, you certainly have to ask for the permission from the webmaster / admin / owner.

Why make that kind of site, surely if you get it from google. People will just visit Google rather than your site.

In making a site, think of something unique and not something that someone else has already done ...

Member Avatar for Member #114696

If your taking info from other sites, you certainly have to ask for the permission from the webmaster / admin / owner.

its a correct statement. however i donot agree with his other points. you could surely add em, but if are making your site only for thatthen its not good decision since thay would surely visit google rather than yours. so make your site unique features plus common features to make it complete

Member Avatar for intiendes

I am glad you agreed :D

Member Avatar for Member #114696

i had written something that couldn't hurt you

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