When Apple announced tvOS in September 2015 I did everything I could to learn it fast, I had been waiting to make my own Apple TV apps for years. I’ve always wanted to build a video platform app just like Netflix. If you’ve followed my blog you may have read my tutorials tvOS Tutorial: Make a Video App in Swift and tvOS Tutorial: Top Shelf in Swift. Those two tutorials were a nice start but there was a lot more work needed to make a Netflix app.
Since I’m not a publisher I don’t have rights to any content so I needed to find some. There are a couple of apps on iOS that have a nice library of classic movies and tv shows that are in the public domain. Little did I know how many great movies and TV shows are in the public domain, movies like House on Haunted Hill, Night of the Living Dead and TV shows like Looney Tunes. I downloaded a couple of these apps and saw that it was nice that you could watch those movies but the apps didn’t offer many features, the key features missing being a Recommendation Engine, My List and Continue Watching.
After spending hours and hours entering a large sample set of movies and tv shows into my database I built out the backend APIs that were needed, such as listing movies by categories, recommended movies, trending movies and recently added. I haven’t done much web programming in a long time, but my past knowledge of Perl and MySQL were enough to get the job done.
Next was the UI, sure I could have come up with a simple user interface but what’s simpler than the existing Netflix interface. So that’s what I used for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Netflix has a ton of users and more than likely the users of my app have already used Netflix so using the same interface would be very familiar.
“Classix, the Netflix for Classic Movies & TV Shows”
Watch Now on Your iPhone®, iPad® and Apple TV®
Watch classic TV shows and movies recommended just for you. Classix has something for everyone. There’s even cartoons and movies just for kids with family-friendly entertainment.
Sign up for Classix Premium and receive no commercials and access to premium content. No hidden fees. One time in-app purchase. No recurring subscription needed.
How does Classix work?
• Classix adds TV shows and movies all the time. Browse titles or search for your favorites.
• The more you watch, the better Classix gets at recommending TV shows and movies that you’ll love—just for you.
• Save your favorites to your list and continue watching where you left off.
• Instantly stream on all iOS devices.
Find out more at http://www.classixapp.com
Twitter: @classixapp
Instagram: @classixapp
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ClassixApp
