genrewatch.com

A release calendar for every genre. Follow a genre or a name — a show, a film, an artist, a rocket — and get told before it is out.

Sibling to tipoffwatch.com, which does the same thing for sport. /sports here redirects there rather than being reimplemented thinly.

The one idea that shapes everything

A sports fixture always has a kickoff. A release very often has a date and no time. TMDB says a film opens on 16 December; MusicBrainz says an album is out in 2026 and nothing finer; The Space Devs says outright that a launch date is accurate only to the month.

So every row carries time_known and precision, and that flag travels all the way through:

Layer	What it does with it
Adapters	Store an undated release at noon UTC, never midnight — midnight is the previous evening for the Americas
Scheduler	Two reminder classes: minute offsets (60, 1) for timed events, date offsets (1440, 0) for dated ones
Pages	Never print a clock for a time nobody announced; an undated row is visibly different
ICS	Emits an all-day DTSTART;VALUE=DATE entry, alarmed 09:00 on the day rather than 60 minutes before a noon anchor
RSS + API	Say "Out Friday 4 September", not "Starts 12:00:00 GMT"

precision of month or year is browsable but never remindable — a representative day is not a promise.

The catalogue

category → genre → subject → event. A subject belongs to many genres (a show is Drama and Sci-Fi and Thriller), so that edge is a join table, not a column.

Category	Source	Key?	Notes
tv	TVmaze	no	/schedule/full returns the entire forward schedule in one request
anime	AniList	no	Real per-episode airing timestamps; 30–90 req/min
film	TMDB	free	The only key. Without it, film is skipped rather than broken
music	MusicBrainz	no	1 req/sec, hard. See below
space	The Space Devs	no	15 requests per hour, for the whole deployment
sports	—	—	Redirects to tipoffwatch.com

Cadence is per adapter and enforced against the last completed sync recorded in the database (genres.synced_at), never against a job timer — a repeatable's timer resets on every deploy, so on a busy day a timer-based sweep can be pushed forward forever and never run.

Music is thin, and that is honest

Measured against the live API on 2026-08-21, over a four-month forward window:

• MusicBrainz knows about 2,228 official releases.
• 11% carry a day. The rest are "2026" or "2026-09".
• Of the artists behind those, 25% have any genre tag.

The alternatives were measured too and are worse: Wikidata has 46 forward music releases in six months, iTunes Search does not expose pre-orders at all, and Deezer's genre-to-artist mapping files Bad Bunny under Rock. There is no free source with volume, dates and genres together. Artist genres are resolved incrementally (MUSIC_LOOKUP_BUDGET per pass) and cached — including the negatives, which is what stops each pass re-asking about the same untagged artists.

The IMDb backfill

The five adapters above answer what is coming. They do not answer what exists — TMDB's back-catalogue walk is popularity-ordered and stops after a few thousand films — and that gap is what makes a reader's own VOD folder unresolvable: a film released last month sits in their folder, has no row here, and so has no page it could be offered on.

So packages/catalog/src/imdb.js walks IMDb's daily dumps. Free, keyless, datasets.imdbws.com, rebuilt every night.

• It streams. Production Postgres is internal to Railway with no public proxy, so this runs inside the container rather than through psql \copy, and the container cannot land a gigabyte on disk. Nothing bigger than one line is held.
• It links before it inserts. A candidate is matched against what we already hold on (category, normalised title, year), so an IMDb row for a film TMDB already gave us enriches that row instead of creating a second page.
• It is bounded and resumable. A pass stops at IMDB_DEADLINE_MS and records the tconst it reached; the next resumes there. The first full walk takes a few nightly runs.

What it deliberately does not give you is a release date. title.basics carries a start year and nothing finer, so these rows are precision: 'year', time_known: false — browsable, searchable and matchable against a playlist, never alarmable. Anything with a real date still comes from TMDB, TVmaze or AniList, and this pass never overwrites one.

Measured against the real dump on 2026-08-23: 1,708,507 rated titles, 428,513 above 100 votes (a 92MB map), and roughly 4% of title.basics rows kept. tvEpisode is excluded outright — 8.5M rows, and an episode is only interesting through its show, which TVmaze already gives us with a real air time.

Knob	Default	What it is for
IMDB_BACKFILL	1	0 turns the whole pass off without a deploy
IMDB_MIN_VOTES	100	A memory budget, not a taste one — the map scales with it
IMDB_RECENT_YEARS	2	Titles this new are kept with no votes. This is the half that fixes new releases
IMDB_DEADLINE_MS	900000	Wall-clock ceiling on one pass

bun run imdb runs it by hand; --deadline=60 gives it a minute instead of fifteen, and --restart clears the cursor.

Mirroring nichedb instead

The four screen sources above -- TMDB, TVmaze, AniList and the IMDb dumps -- are also fetched once, for every site we run, by nichedb.dev into its screen collection. Set

CATALOG_PROVIDERS=nichedb,musicbrainz,spacedevs

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗