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Streaming Criterions – A Website That Tells You Just That

by Jim Rohner on June 16, 2011

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Arthouse film fans rejoice! If it wasn’t awesome enough already that many of your favorite foreign/classic/obscure Criterion Collection titles are available instantly on Netflix, the awesomeness factor has just been kicked up a notch with my recent discovery of Streaming Criterions, a website that, as it sounds, lists all the Criterion Collection titles that are currently available for instant streaming.   

It just got a whole lot harder to go outside

While it is simple enough to just hop on Netflix and search for whatever Ingmar Bergman film you may specifically be salivating for, Streaming Criterions also kicks up the convenience factor by not only linking you to the film’s title page on Netflix, but by also auto-updating the list of available titles. With the Netflix regularly adding/dropping instant titles and Criterion adding new titles to the collection once a month, any static list made is almost immediately outdated. Streaming Criterions’ creator Zac Schellhardt recognized this and created a “machine-generated, auto-updating version of this list. So every night, the code talks to the Criterion web site, and it talks to the Netflix OData API, and it munges the data.”  That means every time you’re on the site, you’re seeing exactly what is available in real time.  Pretty cool, huh?

It’s not just Criterion DVD titles that the site keeps track of either – there’s also a list (albeit it a short one) of the available Eclipse Collection titles and a list of the titles that used to be available on Criterion Laserdisc, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raging Bull and Arsenic and Old Lace.

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Tagged as: Criterion Collection, Eclipse, Instant, Laserdisc, Netflix, Streaming

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