Everyone hates the feeling of visiting a cinema and the movie that’s showing is just not your kind of movie. At the same time, going from cinema to cinema just find that movie that’s perfect for you is a lot of stress.
This challenge is what ‘Now Showing’ wants to solve.
Launched by Iruafemi Joseph on November 11 2015, ‘Now Showing’ is a movie aggregation app that displays trending movies in cinemas and their streaming times across Lagos, Nigeria.
The platform utilises 4-time filters — Now, Next, Tomorrow and Today — an attempt to make it easy to display only scheduled movies that are relevant to that particular filter.
The Now filter displays movies currently running in various cinemas, Next filter displays showing times for upcoming movies, Today filter provides an all-showtimes list for all the movies at all listed cinemas for that day and the Tomorrow filter displays movies that can be watched the next day.
The platform also provides an API that can be integrated into third-party entertainment sites. This allows them to display show times and sell movie tickets to their visitors. According to the founder, this service is already running on two website.
Similar to ‘Now Showing’ is Kolanuts, which was launched on September 8 2016. Although, the service is still quite new in Nigeria, the idea is laudable, as millions of Nigerians are movie lovers who do not miss visiting cinemas every weekend.