This is something I’ve seen quite often recently: the titles on Trakt appear as being available on a streaming platform when in fact they are not. I’ve checked some of the titles on JustWatch and realised they actually have the correct information - it’s just that on Trakt it doesn’t seem to be updated / pulled correctly.
@justin, any ideas what might be causing this? I assume it might be due to a sync job not running often enough. I have to say, this has happened to me quite a few times recently and it’s pretty annoying. I have the titles in my lists filtered out by streaming platforms I subscribed to, but Trakt keeps showing me titles even if they are not available to watch anymore.
We sync every day with JustWatch, so I’m not really sure. They provide us all movies and tv shows and we compare locally. That means we add and remove links to match the data they give us. Do the titles eventually fix themselves?
Sometimes they do after a while (maybe a day, haven’t really checked the interval), other times not. Specifically, right now “A quiet place” appears available on Netflix (it also did a couple of days ago when I opened the topic), but in fact on Netflix it says it will be available starting Sunday. So that’s in fact misleading information (the title cannot be watched right now).
Another example which I have checked several days ago and is still wrong: “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” appears to be on Netflix, but when clicked on the link the app says “Preview Unavailable” and the movie cannot be searched or watched. So that’s again misleading information.
In both cases above, JustWatch shows the correct information: those titles aren’t available in Romania at the moment. So Trakt parses some information in a wrong manner somewhere. The examples I gave have stayed the same for more than a few days, so if the data is pulled daily there must be some other issue.
And since we are on the subject, there might be something wrong with the filtering by streaming platform as well. For instance, “Prisoners” doesn’t appear to be on any streaming services at the moment, but when I filter my titles by streaming service it shows up (even tho it clearly doesn’t stream on any of the selected platforms). I believe it could be some caching in place (the watchlist being cached and when the data is pulled over from JustWatch the cache is not cleared, resulting in this inconsistent behaviour). Just an assumption of course but I’m getting deeper into the topic only because I absolutely love this feature. I use it every time to pick a title from my lists.
We for sure cache the data, but it should refresh the cached data when the JustWatch links are updated. There are likely places more aggressively cached though so it might not reflect instantly everywhere.
I have noticed JustWatch sometimes has links available, but they are previews or coming soon. Not much we can do about that if JustWatch is providing links.
The main issue about some items not updating is something I’ll need to look into. It’s a hard one to reproduce though and I don’t have any captured errors that I’ve found yet.
Is there any way to differentiate between the data coming from JustWatch, in the sense of detecting what’s a preview / coming soon link and an actual available title?
Cause somehow, even tho JustWatch provides those “empty” links, their website is also able to tell me the title is not currently available to watch (see examples I have provided above). So the issue has to be somewhere in the communication between JustWatch and Trakt.
If it helps, I only discovered such issues with Netflix. Not saying it’s only reproducible with Netflix but maybe it’s a starting point.
Just to add some more info from what I discovered, it’s not just Netflix.
“A quiet place” has become available on SkyShowtime as well two days ago in my country. JustWatch shows it’s available on both Netflix and SkyShowtime, Trakt only displays Netflix.
I’ve also triggered a data refresh from the movie’s page last night, but I guess that would only apply for TMDB data, not JustWatch. So must’ve been auto-update.
I’ll return to this thread if I can pinpoint some other issues in this direction (maybe some will be more obvious to debug)
I’m back with this topic, as it keeps happening. Last title for which I’ve seen this is “A Simple Favor”, but I have a more relevant example.
“Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” is one of the examples I was giving in a post 12 days ago, stating that the movie appears available on Trakt and unavailable on JustWatch (JustWatch being correct). The movie is supposed to be available on Netflix, while it’s not actually watchable.
So we can definitely rule out a caching issue, since it’s been more than 12 days since I’ve first discovered this. And JustWatch displays the correct information, so we can rule out wrong data on their side as well.
Maybe their API is missing something? Or a check that’s being done on Trakt’s side is wrong / missing, @justin ?
For edification, some screenshots.
How the title appears to be available on Trakt (WRONG):
It’s annoying, because I filter stuff in my watchlist based on where / if it is available for streaming and I keep getting faulty results due to this issue. Thanks for looking into it!
So I think I have a conclusion about this topic. There are two specific issues here (reproducible on the website as well as in the app):
Issue #1
Step 1. Title becomes available on a streaming platform Step 2. JustWatch displays the title as being available on the streaming platform.
Expected result: Trakt reflects the data available on JustWatch right away, Actual result: It takes some time before Trakt and JustWatch get in sync (usually not more than 48 hours).
Issue #2
Step 1. Title is available on Netflix. Step 2. Title becomes unavailable on Netflix. Step 3. Netflix is removed from the title’s page on JustWatch.
Expected result: Trakt reflects the change from JustWatch right away. Actual result: Trakt never removes Netflix from the title’s Watch Now section. When pressing on the link, it redirects to Netflix, but the movie is obviously not available.
Titles to check this issue with (country selected needs to be Romania): Us, Orphan, The Town, The Usual Suspects and a lot others
@justin / @Ohifriend, I hope outlining the steps helps in finding the root cause of these issues. The first one might just be a caching problem, flushing it more frequently could solve it. The second one tho, I’m not sure.
Thanks for the steps, that does help. I’m not entirely sure why it’s not picking up the changes from JustWatch.
We have a daily automatic update process and it’s supposed to update the entire show or movie with the data from JustWatch. The only reasons it wouldn’t is the update failed to process on our side, or the show/movie wasn’t included in the changed data from JustWatch. I’m trying to determine if we’re capturing any errors around this.
You’ll soon have a refresh button for JustWatch data, and that will hit their API on demand and queue up any updates.
Thanks @justin, I really appreciate the effort you put into this! With a button to refresh the data on purpose I’m already happy, that way I can keep my filters accurate to what’s available to watch.
Tried to debug a bit yesterday and I’ve also briefly checked JustWatch’s API. Couldn’t do much just by looking at the calls in the front-end, but maybe there’s something related to the preview links?
Not sure what the data returned by their API is containing for the automatic update, but if we are matching the results to existing links, that could be the reason of the issue: Netflix always keeps preview links even if the title is not available. Maybe the direct API call is returning a different result (not sending any link if the title is missing) and therefore triggering it manually fixes the issue? Might be a shot in the dark tho…
