Lets face it, the movie studios have a stake in what gets promoted on the main landing page of the iTunes Movie Store or on the Apple TV. They’re going to push what they think you should be buying or renting. Don’t get me started on the fact that at least half of the movies that are visibly promoted are only available for purchase and not for rent. Add to this the “viewing window of availability” for new titles, allowing the movie studios to remove movies all together, which can make finding a movie you want to rent or purchase that much more challenging.
Apple TV Junkie has set out to overcome these issues by seeking out and discovering newly available iTunes and Apple TV HD movies, finding hidden iTunes movie gems, and digging up the movies which had once disappeared. The idea for us was to find and push as much of this hidden movie content out of iTunes and onto the web as frequently as possible. It’s obvious that Apple is looking to move the iTunes Music Store experience to “the cloud“, we want to do the same for the iTunes Movie Store. We want to bring the entire iTunes Movie catalog out from behind iTunes and onto the web. The challenge for us at ATVJ is doing all this within a “blog” structure. The flexibility to do all that we want is just not there. This is all about to change.
Finish over at http://cinemira.posterous.com… or continue reading.
For the better part of the last year, our small but dedicated, hard working, and bootstrapy team has been working on a more robust solution to managing your iTunes movie catalog and discovering new content, this solution is called Cinemira. Cinemira is being built from the ground up to not only be the successor to Apple TV Junkie, but to be the ultimate management and discovery tool for all iTunes movie watchers. Cinemira is being built using the open source framework Cappuccino, which will give it a desktop application like experience in your browser.
Cinemira is not a complete replacement for iTunes the application. What Appsaurus is to the iPhone App Store, Cinemira is to the iTunes Movie Store. You still need iTunes to rent or purchase a movie. Cinemira will give you movie management tools which iTunes does not offer. Cinemira gives you the ability to search through the entire iTunes Movie catalog or focus your search to only iTunes or Apple TV HD movies, receive alerts when your favorite movie becomes available to rent, keep track of the daily HD movie additions to the iTunes catalog, and keep track of your personal iTunes movie collection. All this from your favorite browser and operating system. It’s no longer necessary to fire up iTunes in order to manage your iTunes movie collection, all you need is a browser and access to the internet. Most of these features iTunes currently lacks.
To start, the focus of Cinemira will be on the management and discovery of iTunes movie rentals. All though you can search and find any movie in the iTunes movie catalog with Cinemira, finding a rental version of a particular movie is always most difficult. The Cinemira team is looking to the end of January for an Alpha launch. Most importantly, Cinemira will be completely free for all, but only through your support and use of Cinemira will we be able to continue its development. Head on over to http://www.cinemira.com to learn more. We’ll be adding more information to the site and this blog as the launch moves closer. If you have any questions regarding Cinemira or its development please feel free to email us at admin at cinemira dot com. Thank you.
