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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T03:15:32+00:00

I’m trying to search Netflix through their API, but without logging anyone in (because

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I’m trying to search Netflix through their API, but without logging anyone in (because I want to do this on the back-end, not necessarily related to any user action). I’m just starting off with their API so please forgive me if I’m doing something completely stupid. Here’s the URL I’m trying to access:

http://api.netflix.com/catalog/titles/?oauth_consumer_key=MY_CONSUMER_KEY&oauth_token_secret=MY_SECRET&term=fight+club

However, that gives me a 400 Bad Request error. Is there no way to browse/search the Netflix catalog without having a user first sign in to my application? Or am I doing something wrong?

Note: I’m accessing said URL through my browser, since I only want to perform a GET request, which is what a browser does by default.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When using OAuth you need to compute a signature for the request, even if you’re using 2-legged authentication which just uses your shared-secret and no user token (this means that your application is logged in, but no user is logged in).

    If it’s an HTTP (as in non-SSL) URL then you need to be using the HMAC-SHA1* signature method rather than PLAINTEXT because you don’t want your consumer secret being passed across the wire in plain text.

    If they allow an HTTPS URL then you can use the PLAINTEXT method, but you’ll still need to calculate it as per https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hammer-oauth-10#page-27 and pass that as the oauth_signature query string parameter instead of passing oauth_token_secret. Note that you’ll also need to pass oauth_signature_method=PLAINTEXT as a parameter too.

    Also, it might be worth looking at the response that comes back. If they implement the OAuth Problem Reporting extension then that could give you some help with what’s wrong.

    *or another method that encryptes your shared secret

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