Loretti:
@Brownie, Yeah VIU is very weird.
@Safe for Weebs So I checked your sugestion and removing country indicator it results in 'VIU - 404 Error' page.
Also as I said before about the different looking Viu services, I did checked the playlist for the same series on them and the links look completly different.
For example the series "Dancing Angel"
VIU Indonesia and Malaysia playlist are the same with only difference being country id.
https://www.viu.com/ott/id/en/all/playlist-dancing_angel-playlist-25589677
https://www.viu.com/ott/my/en/all/playlist-dancing_angel-playlist-25589677
(and as I said without the id it gets an error even with the same looking service)
But for country with diffrent looking VIU, like Thailand, the page for the same series looks like this:
https://www.viu.com/ott/th/en-us/vod/285598/Dancing-Angel
That being the case, the only way of linking to Viu with the current system as it is would be to consider each local version of Viu as a separate service (as is being done). Which might be workable for now if only the countries MDL users request are added, rather than all 31 – though, technically, all of them are eligible so should be included.
There are two general ways I can think of getting around this:
- To count the 31 local versions of Viu as a category, like YouTube channels and Vimeo people.
- To allow more than one link to the same service, if, as well as the URL being different, there are tags to indicate combinations of region and subtitle availability which are different between the links.
1 might be easier and quicker to implement, but I'm starting to wonder if 2 might be needed anyway for links to primevideo.com and play.google.com, which, though I'm not sure as I haven't used either for watching myself, might not always use the same URL for the same title in every region, like Netflix does.