Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Closing DVD & Blu-Ray Pricing Site

Almost a year and a half ago, we added DVD and Blu-Ray prices to the site. Unfortunately, over this time period the movie price features have not caught on with users. We have decided to close the movie site on February 19th.

The movie database is much larger than the game database and costs us several hundred dollars every month in server fees. When you include monthly costs for development time and maintenance, we are spending nearly $500 a month operating this portion of the site.

We plan to devote these resources towards video games instead by adding new features, improving our database, and potentially hiring some developers for future projects.

Thank you to those users who did use the movie prices. We are sorry we need to close it, but hope you can understand.

8 comments :

Anonymous said...

Can this technically be spun off if someone wants to devote the time and effort to host it themselves?

JJ Hendricks said...

We could spin off the historic data, movie lists, and information like that.

We cannot spin off the back-end programming though that gathers the prices from different sources or calculates the used and new price. Those things will continue to be used on our site.

ShuTang said...

Awwww. That sucks. Too bad.

Christopher said...

Oh well, don't blame you. From an interest point of view, very different type of item - probably little interest to collectors, very obvious lifetime pricing (£20 - £15 - £10 - £5 - £2), and tons and tons and tons of the things. And always better to specialise.

Anyway, on a totally different note - I don't spose you guys have much experience with Play.com (mostly a European / UK store, now owned by jap Rakuten). I'm trying to figure out the best way to track their prices, but their API is severely lacking (see http://inaudible.co.uk/games/archives/1856 ), and they don't seem to have much in the way of mobile or lightweight sites other than the main fully features one. Which to me says search (by title, no EAN/UPC allowed, error prone), curl and parse. Or could auto log in to a test account and use the only EAN search tool via that, but most of the EANs are different (not like Amazon which has tons of the things linked to each ASIN). Just wondered what you guys thought, as you're the experts :o) Plus, you have a damn fancy way of grabbing eBay API completed results on the cheap :)

Anonymous said...

Too bad it went but never used it.

JJ Hendricks said...

@Christopher - You nailed it in terms of the reason the DVD market was not as successful as the video game market. They are all readily available and pricing all follows the same pattern.

If we do ever expand into different markets in the future, it will be markets with more varied rarity, bigger collecting community, and harder to determine pricing.

In terms of integration with Play. We have never used them before, because we focus on NTSC collecting. Based upon what you mentioned the best way to integrate would probably be linking Play unique IDs with your unique ID. Then scraping the prices from the page. Shoot me an email if you want to discuss more in-depth.

Christopher said...

Cheers. I'll let you know when I figure something out, then see if you can do any better :)

For now, the actual item pages are a lot heavier on code than a search result page (~10k char vs ~6k char) which if I'm simply parsing html that's my main concern (and the biggest bottleneck with speed) so I'm reluctant to do anything with actual item pages, but it could be the easiest way to correct any errors with a search.

Anonymous said...

damn i used it for wrestling dvds and made a killing

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