Last Day To Watch On Netflix

Introduction

Netflix is pretty amazing. Lots of content with no ads, at a price that is still cheaper than cable. Since I don't have a lot of free time (and I don't want to spend all of it watching Netflix), I need to be very selective about what I watch. I usually only watch something if it has reasonable reviews on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. I realized early on that there is a lot of churn happening with movies and tv shows being removed and added each month. For some titles, Netflix only has a license to show it for some unknown period of time before it expires and is removed from its service. After being burned a few times with titles in my list being removed, I decided to see if I could do anything about it.

I found a great website called What's Expiring on Netflix Soon? A group of people will comment when they get an expiring notice on a title or when Netflix's press release comes out with expiring titles. The titles are then ordered by the expiration dates and linked on the main page. This is all done because there is not a way to easily see expiring titles on their website or mobile app. You have to view the detail for the movie or tv show in order to see the notice. Expiring notices are only displayed when there are 29 days or less before the title expires. So through manual human labor, everyone can see most of the titles that are expiring soon and the dates that they are expiring on.

I currently have 182 movies and tv shows on my list. Only 52 titles are not branded as a Netflix Original and I tend to watch those ones first. Netflix Originals are more likely to not expire but there are exceptions to that rule. To manually check each title would take a lot of time. Regularly visiting the What's Expiring on Netflix Soon? website doesn't take too much time but I do have to scan the list for titles in my list. It would be nice if I could get an email that would let me know if I had any expiring titles in my list. So I decided that this would be for my next project with SingularAgent. SingularAgent now has the ability to browse to the Netflix website, check each movie and tv show for an expiring notice, and send me an email every night with the results.

Details

First, SingularAgent starts the Google Chrome application and logs into the Netflix website. The Netflix URL for a title looks like this: https://www.netflix.com/title/70177057. Currently I have to manually record the title ID and title name in SingularAgent's code for each title that I want checked. It would be nice if could just use whatever is listed in My List but that could be a future feature request. SingularAgent will then start typing the URL for each title and then open the developer tools to inspect the HTML. The HTML is parsed and SingularAgent will keep track if any titles have the text "Last day to watch on Netflix: <date>". After all the titles are checked, SingularAgent browses to Gmail and prepares to send me an email. If there are no expiring titles in my list, then the email will say "There are currently no expiring titles in your list." If there are any expiring titles then it will be in the format of: "<Title Name> - <Expiration Date>". SingularAgent then sends the email and closes the browser.

Conclusion

This was a relatively simple project that didn't take too long for me to implement. Now my artificial intelligence software does most of the grunt work for me and gives me a little more peace of mind.