I’ve already blogged about the ability to explicitly list download locations for games and movies placed in your arcade. Today’s developments takes it a step further and simplifies the task of finding a place to download/purchase games and movies that DO NOT have an explicit download location.
Search Providers are useful because they will help guide you and/or the players in your arcade down the right path when trying to find a place to download/purchase missing media. They provide shortcuts for searching relevant sites for download/purchase locations.
A variety of default Search Providers will also come stock with the mod, but players can easily create new custom Search Providers.
When you join a multiplayer arcade, you have access to all of the custom Search Providers used by the host in addition to any custom Search Providers you may have defined. And as always, you have access to the default Search Providers as well.
This is what a Search Provider looks like in the UI:
Each search provider contains the following information:
1. The name of the site (Ex. Amazon.com, Direct2Drive.com, Netflix.com)
2. The type of the transaction (Ex. purchase, stream, download)
3. The search syntax URL of the site where $TITLE gets replaced with the media item title (Ex. http://www.netflix.com/Search?v1=$TITLE)
4. A brief description of the Search Provider
5. The TYPES of media that this Search Provider is relevant to (Ex. movies, pc, snes, nes, etc.)
Only relevant Search Providers are listed for the items. For example, Netflix will never show up as a Search Provider for a missing PC game.