A little of everything professional. This site contains the largest online collection of electronic signature laws and research, my views on Time Management & GTD life hacks for improving productivity, and my After Thoughts on bad decisions and business improvements. Personal thoughts and casual comments are pushed to my SEO project, The World's Greatest Guy.

RSS feeds for Movie Theater Showtimes

in

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?

 

 


Comments

Found this while searching

On June 22nd, 2006 jondotcom (not verified) says:

Found this while searching for the same thing.

... so that makes 2 of us.

My Own Version

On July 23rd, 2006 Anonymous (not verified) says:

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

Try

On August 3rd, 2007 Anonymous (not verified) says:

Try this:
http://isnoop.net/rss/theater.php

It's been more than one year

On August 10th, 2007 Anonymouse (not verified) says:

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...

RSS feed for movie times

On September 19th, 2007 Justin LaBo (not verified) says:

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.

Also looking for something like this widescale

On January 2nd, 2008 Tim (not verified) says:

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!

I think we'll have to build one

On January 9th, 2008 evan (not verified) says:

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.

RSS Feed for local showtimes

On April 10th, 2008 Charley (not verified) says:

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

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd><p><b><i><blockquote>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
Are you really a real person? Oh sure, like I can just trust you. Hey that's ASCII art! Cool.
           _      __  __           _____   _  _   
  ___     / \    |  \/  |  _   _  |  ___| | || |  
 / __|   / _ \   | |\/| | | | | | | |_    | || |_ 
 \__ \  / ___ \  | |  | | | |_| | |  _|   |__   _|
 |___/ /_/   \_\ |_|  |_|  \__, | |_|        |_|  
                           |___/
Enter the code depicted in ASCII art style.