These are some thoughts about what this App is going to be

It is a tool to discover new content within your circle
Source to find where to view content legally
Tool to share the joy of discovering new content

What this app is not going to be

A list of movies released every week
Rating app - It is just a recommendation to discover great content from friends. Ratings and Reviews kind of take the fun away from movies before you watch them. They are however a great way to get a perspective after you finish watching

Features

Register & Login
Invite Friends from contacts
View Movies shared by Friends. Mark a movie as seen/Unseen.
Seen Movies do not become part of your ongoing list
Search - Share a Movie/ Show - Reference from IMDB (Lookup)
Add Source you have seen the movie (Automatically retrieve from third party)
Receive Notifications when new content is added or when one of the movies in your not seen list pops up on your Netflix or Amazon or HBO
Respond to new content with seen/Not seen

What did I end up doing today!

IMDB API has always been a mystery. I can’t understand why amazon would not release an api for IMDB on AWS and charge for it. They have valuable information and they behave like dicks holding on to it (They have a data dump but come on who cares about that in this age). I will have to look for alternatives now
I remember an api I had looked up where you can find out all legal sources of watching a movie. I have to dig into it again
I have found some alternative databases for movies. I am going to give these a try and figure out which one to use for our search. The most important thing is to have a great search which is simple and easy to find movies. If the movie is on our database, great we can control the search but, if the movie is not in our DB, we need to search from some public API. This will be the most important part of the application
Found TheMovieDB - this seems to be a good source with access to a lot of content. We can start with for the MVP and see how it evolves

https://www.themoviedb.org/documentation/api

Need to design the application from scratch. I have a few alternatives here, buy something which looks good and customize it or design from scratch. The first alternative is what I will venture out and test before falling back on the second if necessary
Either way, I need a design tool to help me with material downloaded or new material to create. I have purchased a 10 $ per month license to Adobe XD hoping it will help things out. I am also looking to do a small course in Udemy to get myself familiar with XD.

That's it for today

I have thought about it and yes, it is a kind of addiction. I have to find new movies, TV series, documentaries or even web shows off late to watch constantly and this urge is uncontrollable.

I have found different ways to discover new content, reading blogs, getting alerts, following people on twitter or finally just infinitely browsing for hours sometimes to find that one show that is going to give me jitters. The feeling when you do find something good is orgasmic to say the least.

But, the truth often is that my biggest source of content has always been friends and trust me when I say this is a very personal, small list of people whose choices I trust and whose company I enjoy. Many of my friends have stopped sharing information on facebook (as it is cluttered with content created by random people) or whats app (conversations have begun to drift to socio political discourses) hence, this need to create something.

I have therefore decided to create a small application which I want to share with my fellow Junkies. I also want this entire process to be a learning experience for me hence I want to document everything I am doing from where to find the right design to finding the right technology to writing the right code.

I also want to use this opportunity to implement what I preach as a Product Manager, lets build something small and iterate over it.

Welcome to "Screen Junky"