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Show HN: Weekend project, shows when the next season of your TV show premieres

by patricklorio on 2/8/21, 4:09 PM with 67 comments

• by dawnerd on 2/8/21, 5:14 PM

  Not bad but as others have mentioned the data is way off in a lot of cases. I know thats not your fault but it's common across all of the google results for 'next season of x'.

  The benefit you have, and I hope you stick to it, is theres no multiple paragraphs explaining the show before getting to the information that well, theres no idea when the next season is.

  One suggestion, if there isn't a known set date (Example The Mandolorian, https://next-season-of.com/the-mandalorian/) don't show 'December 2021'. Also with that page, the top says 2022, but the next season shows 2021.

  Quick edit: I wish you the best in the SEO game. You're going up against a lot of outlets with a lot of money thrown at ranking at the top. I'll be rooting for you, anything to chip away at the spam pages that are nothing but 'what we know...'

• by mzarate06 on 2/8/21, 4:28 PM

  Thanks for this, I've bookmarked the site and may use it in the future. It's a drag searching for new release dates in blog posts or articles purporting an answer, only to find they're omitted or buried. Though as your OP states, perhaps I should have been searching IMDB all along.

  I searched on "Expan" on your site and found The Expanse easy enough (the site is quite fast), but I still had to visit IMDB afterward - I wasn't sure if there was a season 6. IMDB confirmed there is, but as expected, with an unknown date.

  So I'll leave this for you to consider - list future seasons, even if they include or cite something to the effect of "date pending". That might prevent visitors from needing IMDB or other sources in use cases such as mine.

  Including episode air dates is another addition I'd vote for.

  Nice work!

• by irrational on 2/8/21, 5:28 PM

  It doesn’t appear to work. I looked up Firefly and it didn’t tell me when the second season will start.

• by lostapathy on 2/8/21, 4:46 PM

  It'd be super cool to have RSS feeds (limited to episodes that have already aired), so I could subscribe to shows I care about and get updates in my feed reader when new episodes come out.

  My biggest annoyance with TV is not knowing when it's time to come back and start watching again - this would totally solve that for me. I would pay for this.

• by whenlambo on 2/8/21, 5:02 PM

  I’ve searched for “Better Call Saul” and it’s saying that 6th episode of that series are released at 31 Dec 2020. But season six just started filming in February 2020.

• by the_arun on 2/8/21, 8:36 PM

  Curious to know reason for scrapping Data from IMDB. They already give out data here right? https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

• by epalm on 2/8/21, 6:08 PM

  Nice work. Just a heads up for troubleshooting, I searched for Succession and it shows when Season 1 and Season 2 were released, and said it's next season is Season 4. Looks like Season 3 was skipped? https://i.imgur.com/2IegGEK.png

• by lode on 2/8/21, 4:35 PM

  Nice work for a weekend's worth of work.

  It does seem to have quite some overlap with https://next-episode.net

• by tzs on 2/8/21, 6:08 PM

  Others have mentioned that the data sources for this kind of thing are often quite wrong.

  An alternative approach, if you are willing to limit how far ahead it can tell you of the next season, is to use TV listings. That will only give you a couple of weeks warning that the new season is starting, but for a lot of people that is fine.

  I used to do something like that for movies on non-premium cable. For most movies I wanted to see, I'd wait until they showed up on some channel included in my cable package, such as FXX, Disney, TNT, Cartoon Network, USA, TBS, or similar.

  I had a list of movies I was waiting for and a PhantomJS script that would go to the Comcast schedule site for my area and grab all the movies showing in the next two weeks, and tell me if any that I were waiting for were on any channels that were included in my package.

• by patricklorio on 2/8/21, 4:11 PM

  Here's a clickable link, https://next-season-of.com

• by jaden on 2/8/21, 8:59 PM

  You might want to consider using https://thetvdb.com/ for your data source. It still has problems, but overall it seems to be more accurate than IMDb.

• by Guest19023892 on 2/8/21, 4:50 PM

  Nice work on a quick project. One note though. I searched for "The Office". The results I got were...

  https://next-season-of.com/the-office/

  https://next-season-of.com/the-office-the-accountants/

  The first I've never heard of before, and the second is some kind of web episode series for The Office (US). If I search on IMDB, the first result is The Office (US) and the second is The Office (UK), which is what I would expect based on ordering by popularity. Both of those seem to be missing from your results.

• by maxmcd on 2/8/21, 4:18 PM

  We skipped season 3 and I missed season 4! https://next-season-of.com/atlanta/

  :)

  The data does seem to be pretty solid in my random other searches though.

• by samteeeee on 2/8/21, 5:01 PM

  Thanks for this! I made something similar but for knowing when your fav movie director releases a new movie:

  https://directoralerts.website/

• by elcritch on 2/8/21, 7:59 PM

  Nice project! I'd love something similar for Audible series and thought about making one too. The Audible recommendation system almost always fails to alert me when a new book of a series I'm listening to is released. It's crazy because it'd relatively simple batch query and would likely drive a lot of sells. Also I'm still not concerned about AI taking over the world yet as it can't even find glaringly solutions like that (presuming Amazon has an AI recommendation system for Audible... maybe?).

• by sanmak on 2/9/21, 6:27 PM

  To the author, nice work. Kudos. Wanted to know how it actually works. Are you scrapping at a continuous interval, preparing ui components at those durations and build once it's done.

  Adding more content about the show and information about the casts will definitely helps in SEO. Try to add last updated time in all the pages. It triggers google about how relevant data is w.r.t current time. I have done this trick with my blog and it works.

  Btw, nice work.

• by elil17 on 2/8/21, 8:26 PM

  Perhaps this would work better as a wiki/crowdsourced data site - I'd love to be able to help correct the errors I find

• by wonder_er on 2/8/21, 11:34 PM

  so, most of the comments seem to be focused on "ooh, here's an edge case where the data is wrong", so... that's not why I'm here.

  This is a SUPER COOL PROJECT! Huge accomplishment. I bet you've learned a ton, I hope you'll write a blog post about it at some point.

  You should totally add a footer with links to more about you, where you'll write up what you've learned, etc.

  For example - I recently did a tiny little project [0] (an hour or two) but I always re-use a footer that has a link to the repo or companion blog post.

  I'm more interested in how you built the app than what it does, per se, so help me out by making it easier to follow along with what you're building!

  [0]: https://rss-feed-finder.herokuapp.com/

• by emayljames on 2/8/21, 8:43 PM

  You have really bad data. Euphoria the series references the wrong series (some old unrelated series, or likely wrong data). Euphoria is a series that started in 2019.

  https://next-season-of.com/euphoria/

• by bawolff on 2/8/21, 8:06 PM

  Cool.

  From a ui perspective, maybe make the actual next seaso date stand out more. When i first viewed i assumed that the next season would be listed after all existing seasons and totally missed it at the top (and i assumed you just didnt have data for the thing i looked up)

• by smusamashah on 2/8/21, 11:44 PM

  https://next-season-of.com/the-witcher/ There is no season 2 yet so there is something wrong with the source your extracting from.

• by hasbot on 2/8/21, 4:32 PM

  IMHO, the search bar should always be present at the top of the page. Probably should also have a link to the actual IMDB page. Given that you're using IMDB data do you not have to mention that?

• by minutillo on 2/8/21, 4:36 PM

  Wrong information for Better Call Saul. Season six is yet to be released.

• by vojant on 2/8/21, 4:21 PM

  I used to have similar project called WhenEpisode.com. I was generating landing page for each show with the title "When is the next episode of...", it was catching some google traffic.

• by wodenokoto on 2/8/21, 5:00 PM

  A nice feature would be to show where that season airs.

• by XCSme on 2/10/21, 2:18 PM

  I tried it for "American Gods" and it says Season 3: planned for undefined, but Season 3 has already started.

• by dbspin on 2/8/21, 5:13 PM

  'Euphoria' brings up a little known series from 2012, rather than the popular HBO series of the same name.

• by maximp on 2/8/21, 9:04 PM

  Love the simple interface and speed. Looked up a few shows, but nothing's being produced during COVID :(

• by radicalriddler on 2/8/21, 10:32 PM

  Trying to search The Flash brings up the 1990 series rather than the modern CW version haha

• by reaperducer on 2/8/21, 4:22 PM

  I like it. Fast and clean.

  More importantly (to me), it let me see how few of the shows I watch are in IMDB.

• by rohanaed on 2/8/21, 6:23 PM

  Hey, that's good. I used it to find Kim's convenience next season info.

• by bangelo on 2/8/21, 8:00 PM

  I went skiing this weekend, which you can do too with your tech monie$

• by cogburnd02 on 2/8/21, 10:32 PM

  Doesn't seem to work on IE 11 on Windows 10.