What the API does and who it is for
Streaming Availability answers one deceptively simple question at scale: on which streaming service can someone actually watch a given title right now, and in which country? Beyond a simple yes/no, it returns deep links that drop the viewer directly into the player, quality flags (SD, HD, UHD), available subtitles and audio tracks, the date a title was first detected on a service, when it is scheduled to leave, and — for titles available to buy or rent — the price and currency.
The provider supports Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, Starz, Showtime, Apple TV, Mubi, Stan, Now, Wow, Crave, All 4, BBC iPlayer, BritBox, Hotstar, Zee5, and others. It also handles channel and add-on layers such as Apple TV Channels, Hulu Add-ons, and Prime Video Channels — a detail that matters because a title's availability often depends on whether a subscriber has a specific add-on, not just the base service.
The typical integrators are streaming guide apps, content aggregators, recommendation engines, and tools that help users decide which subscriptions to keep. The API is available via RapidAPI and the provider's own documentation site.
Endpoint landscape
With 33 documented endpoints there is some overlap between versioned (/v2/…) and legacy paths, but the functional surface is organized around a handful of clear use cases.
Show lookup
- Get Basic / Get by Id / Get Show — Retrieve streaming availability for a single title by its IMDb or TMDb ID. The TMDb format is
tv/71712ormovie/464052. The free tier covers the basic variant; the ultra variant adds global availability in every service-country combination in one call. - Get Ultra — Same ID-based lookup but returns every service-country combination worldwide in a single response, useful when you want to build a global availability table.
Catalog search
- Search Basic (free) — Browse a service's catalog in a given country; filters include language, genre, and keyword. Returns 8 items per page.
- Search Pro — Adds release year filtering; 10 items per page.
- Search Ultra — Adds IMDb rating range and vote count thresholds; 25 items per page (v2 variant).
- Search by Filters / Search Shows by Filters — The most flexible search endpoint: pass up to 16 services simultaneously, filter by language, genre, keyword, and release year; 25 items per page.
- Search by Title — Plain title search returning up to 20–25 matches depending on version. Useful for autocomplete or disambiguation.
Catalog change tracking
- Changes / Get Changes — Query new, removed, updated, expiring, or upcoming titles within a set of services. Paginated at 25 results; changes are timestamped. This is the endpoint to poll for keeping a local cache current.
- Leaving — Dedicated endpoint for titles expiring within the next 31 days, or flagged as leaving without a fixed date. No pagination.
Metadata endpoints
- Countries / Get Country — Returns every supported country with service details, logos, and supported streaming types.
- Genres — ID-to-name mapping for genre filters.
- Services — List of supported services with metadata.
All show responses include TMDB and IMDb IDs, poster and backdrop images, cast, director, genre tags, and ratings alongside the streaming availability payload.
Pricing breakdown
| Plan | Price | Monthly requests | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | 500 | — |
| Pro | $49 | 25,000 | 100 req/sec |
| Ultra | $79 | 100,000 | 150 req/sec |
| Mega | $249 | 1,000,000 | 250 req/sec |
The free Basic tier gives 500 requests per month, which is enough for a prototype or a very low-traffic personal project but will be exhausted quickly in production. At roughly 500 distinct title lookups or 62 search pages (8 results each), it leaves little headroom. Upgrading to Pro at $49 buys 25,000 requests — a 50× increase — and adds a defined rate limit of 100 requests per second. Ultra's 100,000-request ceiling at $79 represents good value if your throughput justifies it; the marginal cost per request drops from $0.00196 (Pro) to $0.00079 (Ultra). Mega targets high-volume commercial products with 1 million requests per month at $249.
Note that only some endpoints are designated FREE; endpoints like Search Pro, Search Ultra, Changes, and Leaving require at least a paid plan.
Practical use cases
Streaming guide apps are the primary use case. A user searches for a title; the app calls Search by Title to resolve it, then Get Show (or Get Ultra) to display a structured list of where to watch it, complete with deep links that open the correct streaming service.
"What's new / what's leaving" features are served directly by the Changes and Leaving endpoints. Polling Changes once or a few times per day (the underlying data refreshes daily) keeps a local cache synchronized without hammering lookup endpoints.
Subscription recommenders — tools that compare a user's watchlist against available services to suggest which one subscription covers the most titles — benefit from Search by Filters with multi-service queries and the popularity-ordered search results.
Content dashboards and analytics tools can use the popularity-ordering parameters (sort by popularity over different time periods) combined with the daily Top 10 data to track what's trending on specific services in specific markets.
Limitations and integration considerations
Success rate sits at 90%, which is acceptable but worth factoring into error-handling logic. Design retries and graceful fallbacks for cases where the API returns a non-2xx response.
Latency averages 788 ms. For real-time user-facing queries, consider caching results locally, especially for show-level lookups that change at most daily.
Attribution requirement — this is a hard constraint to read before going to production. If you make the API's data publicly visible (in an app, on a website, in any user-facing product), you must attribute Streaming Availability as the source. The exact terms are in the project's TERMS.md file on GitHub. Overlooking this can create a licensing problem after launch.
Data freshness is once per day. The API is not appropriate for scenarios requiring real-time catalogue synchronisation at the minute or hour level.
Free tier scope is restricted: several high-value endpoints (Changes, Leaving, Search Pro/Ultra) require a paid subscription. Evaluate which endpoints your product actually needs before assuming the free tier is sufficient for even an MVP.
Versioning — the endpoint list mixes /v2/, legacy paths, and at least one explicitly deprecated endpoint (/shows/{type}/{id}). The documentation at docs.movieofthenight.com and the GitHub repository should be the authority on which paths to use in new integrations.
Getting started
A free subscription is available instantly through the RapidAPI marketplace — no waiting for approval. The API key is provisioned on signup. Official client libraries are provided for Go and TypeScript/JavaScript via GitHub (movieofthenight/go-streaming-availability and movieofthenight/ts-streaming-availability), both under MIT licenses. Developers in other languages can use any HTTP client and work directly with the REST endpoints.
A sensible integration path: start with /v2/search/title (free) to resolve a title to its IMDb or TMDb ID, then call /v2/get/basic (also free) to fetch country-specific streaming availability. Once you need multi-country global data or change-tracking, that is the natural point to upgrade to a paid plan.
