Inspiration
We were driven by the frustration felt on movie nights with friends, where far too much time and effort is spent scrolling through Netflix and Hulu and trying to decide on a movie that fits everyone's tastes. Especially due to COVID and stay-at-home orders, watching movies has become a well-loved activity around the apartment. We wanted to build a service that would streamline this process and make future movie nights even more enjoyable.
What it does
EZFlix allows groups of friends to collaboratively generate a list of suggested movies based on everyone's preferences. The host visits our web app, enters in some basic preferences, and receives a unique group code from 10,000 possible codes that the host and the rest of the group texts to a phone number to complete an interactive questionnaire through SMS. Once everyone completes the questionnaire, our app uses the gathered data to generate a list of suggested movies from our database of over 85,000 movies, which is sent back to the users.
How we built it
Our app is built using Flask for the web app, Python for the backend, MongoDB for our database, and Twilio for handling SMS communication. Our final site is hosted on Heroku. To relate the basic question responses to movie recommendations, we utilized KNN.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered some challenges with learning NoSQL to use MongoDB, as well as using Twilio APIs to implement a 2-way conversation between our app and the users. We also struggled with sending the resulting movie suggestions to all members of the group, and settled with sending them to one person.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to build a multi-platform app that links different technologies together that we were not very familiar with. With HackUCI being our first hackathon, we surprised ourselves with how much we were able to do in such short time.
What we learned
We learned a lot about how to use NoSQL and MongoDB to store and retrieve data. We also learned about using Twilio for communication tasks.
What's next for EZFlix
We want to expand the questionnaire to gather higher-quality data, and add a voting feature to vote on movies to watch. We would also like to improve our recommendation algorithms and implement sending to large groups using Twilio.
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