Thinking outside the box!

RSS feeds for Movie Theater Showtimes

Posted Mon, 06/05/2006 - 18:43 by Isaac

I saw 3 new movies this past weekend; The Break Up, MI:III, X-Men
III. While I did enjoy the shows this is not a review post. Its a post
on why I can't find RSS feeds for any of my local theaters.
I realized that the normal process I go through for finding my
showtimes is cumbersome. I login into My Yahoo (which I only use
because of the movie listing) and then browse my pre-selected favorite
theaters (edit: Now I use Google Search "movie zipcode" for the desktop
and fandango for my Blackberry). Then I thought, why can't I get these
in a RSS feed and then just click on Thunderbird to read my movie
theater showtime news? I could have it plugged into Google just in case
I am at some else's computer and I could even pipe it to my cellphone.
But after looking around I discovered that no one offers a rss feed for movie showtimes. This is a shame. Nielsen NetRatings
did a survey in June 2005 and found that 66% either did not understand
RSS technology or had never heard of it. In October of 2005 Yahoo and
Ipsos Insight reported that while 27% of users had read RSS content,
only 4% of those readers knew they were using RSS feeds.
Obviously education would be a major consideration for increasing
viewers of this type of movie showtime RSS feed. But since each theater
is already pushing their showtime content out to sites like Fandango
and Yahoo Movies it would not be a difficult task to funnel the content
into RSS feeds for early adoptors like myself.
Here are a few things I have stumbled across:

Have you found anything of interest?

I still read the posts to this article and if you find something that does this please let me know.


Comments

Commements from Readers on my old site:

by Isaac - 03/16/2009 - 21:58

jondotcom, Found this while searching for the same thing.... so that makes 2 of us.

Anonymous,
I have taken the ideas of one of the links above and created a php file that will get all the info and put it into an xml file for use. I took it one step further and made it so that you can get showtimes for the rest of the week also, not just the current day. It's not elegant code but it works. File: http://kenfrey.net/movies.rar
Anonymous, Try this: http://isnoop.net/rss/theater.php

Anonymous, It's been more than one year since this blog entry, and I *still* can't find anything on the net for syndication of showtimes. And KenFrey's website is down as well. Bah! He had a good idea though... build a web scraping script that checks in with Yahoo, Fandango or another popular showtimes website and gives you the theaters you want. I may just do that...

Justin LaBo, I'm desperate for an tool that will allow me to input my zip code and spit out local movie times. I've been using the one over at iSnoop.net, but it's always going down. There must be something else out there. Help! Thanks.

Tim, I found this feed while searching for an RSS
feed to display local movie theater listings. I am needing a solution
similar to the isnoop one but one that I can run on my own site. Search capabilities are important for my project as I want to be able to cater to customers worldwide or at the very least North America
wide. If anyone has any new suggestions or solutions I would greatly appreciate the help!

evan,  I need to get the same data. I need the data of theaters and showtimes
by movie name and zip code. That will ultimately be displayed in flash.
Keep me posted if anyone finds anything new.

Charley, I'm using the isnoop method and just putting it in an iframe. Works well for me! :)