Simcine

Simcine is a full-stack movie and TV discovery platform focused on helping users find titles that feel meaningfully similar, manage their personal viewing library, rate and review content, browse TV episodes, and optionally share a public taste profile. The project matters because it combines media metadata, user interactions, search, recommendations, and profile-based discovery into a product-style web app that demonstrates backend architecture, frontend product design, authentication, privacy controls, and production-readiness planning.

Problem

Most movie and TV discovery tools rely heavily on popularity, broad genre labels, or basic recommendation widgets. Users often want a more personal and explainable way to discover titles: what feels similar, what matches their taste, what they have already saved or watched, and what other users publicly share through ratings, favorites, and reviews.

A second problem is that personal media activity can be sensitive. A user may want a public profile while keeping some sections private, such as watch history, ratings, favorites, or watchlist.

Solution

Simcine provides a movie and TV discovery experience with:

Search and discovery for movies, TV shows, and people.
Detail pages for movie, TV, and person records.
User interactions: watchlist, favorites, watch history, ratings, and planned reviews.
Public profile pages at /profile/{username}.
Privacy controls for public sections.
Account settings for personal info, login/security, privacy, preferences, site settings, and account deletion.
TV episode browsing with season selection and episode detail pages.
Recommendation architecture based on title metadata, user preferences, user interactions, and future semantic similarity.

The platform is built around a Django backend API and a Next.js frontend.

User Experience

Users can browse Simcine without an account, search for movies/TV/people, view public profiles, and explore title pages. Logged-in users can save titles to a watchlist, mark favorites, rate titles, track history, edit their profile, configure privacy settings, and manage account settings.

Public profiles are designed to show a user's taste while respecting privacy. A profile may show public stats, ratings, favorites, watchlist, reviews, or watch history only if the user has enabled those sections.

The TV detail experience includes an episode block before "More Like This" recommendations. Users can select a season, scroll through episode cards, and open an episode detail page.

Current Status

Simcine is in active MVP development. The core app structure, profile system, authentication cleanup, TV episode architecture, and production-readiness planning are in progress. Backend checks and frontend TypeScript checks have passed at the latest checkpoint, but runtime QA, email verification behavior, review features, search suggestions, legal/footer pages, cookie consent, and production deployment still need completion.

Tech Stack

Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind-style utility classes.
Backend: Django, Django REST Framework.
Database: PostgreSQL.
Vector / semantic search direction: pgvector and embeddings.
Auth: Django auth, django-allauth, Google OAuth.
External data: TMDB API for movie, TV, person, season, and episode metadata.
Deployment target: Vercel for frontend, Oracle Cloud Always Free VM for Django/Postgres backend, Cloudflare for DNS/domain/SSL.
Planned production services: Docker Compose, Nginx or Caddy, environment-based configuration.

Simcine

Simcine

Problem

Solution

User Experience

Current Status

Tech Stack

Links