Mainstream

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to make a movie marathon playlist for Halloween, or wanted to binge all of your favorite episodes of a TV series? We provide just that service with Mainstream. All you need to do is link up your streaming accounts, and then you're free to browse any movie or TV show on these services and build your playlist.

What it does

Mainstream allows you to link your accounts on various streaming platforms and create playlists of movies and shows, allowing you a seamless experience without having to get up and find new titles between showings.

How we built it

We used Next.js as our frontend and Selenium (Python) for our backend.

Challenges we ran into

It was an interesting and complex challenge to figure out how to work within the legal parameters of each streaming service (in terms of use of content, even if for non-profit personal usage, and access via scripting). We managed to find an API (JustWatch) that would provide us taglines and visuals for different movies and shows, which meant that we didn't have to scrape streaming services to make a browseable list of items.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built out a backend which can link multiple streaming accounts and automatically login given username and password; the backend also pulls up the requested title and plays it when prompted.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with Next.js, and learned a good paradigm for distinguishing frontend and backend.

What's next for Mainstream

We'd like to completely flesh out the frontend and add some more playlist-like features to the application, such as looping and autoplay. We may also piggyback the application on services that allow for remote watching of several parties, such as rabb.it.

Built With

• javascript
• json
• justwatch
• next.js
• python
• react
• selenium
• typescript