| Overall: | 13 | 6 |
| Design: | 5 | 3 |
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| Usefulness: | 6 | 2 |
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There are a number of TV guides out there like, TV.com, and Zap2it. They all do things in roughly the same way. I want to create a different kind of TV guide. One that helps you watch TV.
How To Use The Site
As you find shows you like, add them to your guide. You can add shows to your guide without creating an account. If you want to save your guide, just login. If you have never logged in its the same as creating an account. Your guide will autmatically be attached to your new account.
Would you use it?
Would I use your site? Probably not. At least not in it's current form. I have a TiVO that magically records most things for me.
Your default view shows yesterday first, then today, tomorrow, etc... The yesterday tab should be collapsed by default. It would be very nice if for shows I've missed you had links to either the networks site for streaming the video or to eztv.it. This feature would be what could get me to use your site as it would be the one stop shopping for locating missed shows on the web.
I was confused that "Exact Show Times" link took me to different sites for different shows.
When I searched for the Simpsons, it is only listed as showing on Sundays. The Simpsons are on TV several times a day in my market.
On the other hand, shows like "All My Children" showed up twice in all the searches.
You need to create your robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
How far in advance do you get your data? On my Direct TiVo I generally get show times 10 days out. I was expecting to see next weeks "Amazing Race" in your lineup, but it's not there.
What are you using to index your shows? When I search for "The amazing race 15", it shows up on the second page even though I typed in an exact match. (May not be fixable without major work.. I understand.)
You have an interesting site. If I didn't own a TiVo, your idea would be cool. But then again, if I didn't own a TiVo, I wouldn't watch TV.
Good luck!
I'll just say this. What is the purpose of your site? I don't get it from just browsing for 30 seconds and if other people are anything like me, they will not look around your site for more than 30 seconds (and that's a stretch) to figure out what you're site does. I don't get what you're trying to offer/solve here, it's not obvious how your site can benefit me so I wouldn't use it.
I probably would not use the site (even if it worked) because I do not watch TV. I spend most of my time working on my projects or doing something where I'm active. I tried adding some shows but when I went to "Your Guide" (which would make more sense as "My Guide"), I received an error: The site is having problems. Email me if they go on longer then you think they should. alex@alexkessinger.net
Also, I don't understand the differences between late-night and late-late-night because I sleep during the day and am up during the night... so is the late-night my early-early-morning? This us of language seems unprofessional to me. Also, I couldn't find the links to stream online TV... the site seems broken.
Honestly probably not. I saw your post on HN and skipped it because it wasn't something I thought I would use. I suppose I just can't see a need for a web-based TV guide (yours or any other). I schedule my shows to be recorded in Vista Media Center and things generally "just work" whether the show changes times or nights or whatever. Perhaps if you could explain some use cases for a service like this?
For what it's worth, I liked the simple interface. It was pretty obvious what was going on right away. You may want to work on the "New Shows Today" area because nothing there caught my interest (show-wise... an MTV2 show?) and it wasn't at all clear to me how the shows listed were chosen.
Also I noticed that your About page is the same as your landing page. When I tried to get more information to answer my questions above by going there... well there was no more info obviously. :-)
I like your choice to use search as the primary mechanism for finding shows because there are so many. I would suggest adding a category (SciFi, Drama, etc.) browsing option though so I might be able to find NEW (to me) shows.
I had a problem with the search functionality though. When I searched for Fringe I was taken to a page that confused me. Later, after some additional more generic searches, I figured out I was actually taken directly to Fringe's show page instead of the search results page I expected. I actually like that but think that page needs to more obviously look like it's for just that show.
I think a good amount of my confusion was because of the table of data in the middle of the page. The first column was just labeled "Info" and I thought it was supposed to be the search results. Eventually I realized that's where episode data shows up. I would strongly suggest changing that first column header from Info to Episode to alleviate that confusion.
I liked the episode details. It would be nice if you could pull in something graphically representative of the show and display it on the show's page. That would help visually cue me in that I'm on that show's page. I was confused by the Links area. Specifically the TV.com link for Fringe (and later I noticed for all shows) has Mad Men in the URL so it looks like it's a bad link to another show. It actually appeared to take me to Fringe so I don't know what's going on there.
I added Bones and Fringe to my guide. When I went to my guide both were listed and had "new" next to them with dates of 10/1. I wish it showed me some info on the new episode here. It didn't so I clicked through to Bones. Once on the show's page it listed 7 episodes in that Info/episode table but they were all reruns on TNT which I don't even get. It only had episodes shown through 9/29 so even in here I couldn't see where I could see any info on the new episode.
Also, I noticed you don't seem to tell me when the episodes air other than evening or primetime. How is that useful for a TV guide? Doesn't a TV guide need to tell me when my show is on? Am I missing something here?
Another feature that is missing is an easy way for me to configure what channels I get and have staytuned.in filter to just those. Other services online offer this and I think you'll need to as well. Typically I have to put in my zip code and then choose my provider (cable, satellite, OTA, etc.) and it then knows what stations I can get.
Something that might be kind of neat that I haven't seen (although it might exist) is a bit of social networking added on top of something like this. A way for me to find new shows I might like based on what shows my friends like.
Do you have any plans to monetize this in some way?
Wow thanks for the great feedback.
First, I am not targeting the entire TV audience. People who have tivo, or something like tivo are already taken care of, but not everyone has a tivo. I personally download a lot of TV, and am constantly asking myself, what shows of mine are on tonight? I needed a solution for that question.
There are other things I wanted to do as well, and in response to some of your other questions I think that will become apparent.
So, if I were to show some mtv2 stuff, there invariably would be someone who would say mtv2 doesn't peak my interest. I don't have a good solution for that right now. My idea for the future is to get the data for how people use my site, what shows they like, and then do a Netflix type recommendation system, but its a chiken and the egg, I might be able to get some of this data elsewhere to start, but I was incredibily harsh on myself, to strip away everything that absolutely did not have to be there at launch, and then iterate in public. So, note taken and its something that I am working on.
My about page, I guess its tough, I am not sure what people want to know. What do you want to know, mayby that will help me create an about page. I guess I thought I had explained my self on the front-page, and that someday I would create and about this page so I left there as a place holder, but first I needed to know what people wanted to know.
Hey I like the idea of genre based searching, right now my data source is extremely limited. TV listings data is not really publicly available. There is no great API out there for it. I am sort of cobbling things together. There are methods for finding genre, but like I said above I really wanted to strip things down and respond to user feedback, so +1 for genre searching. Besides genre searching, I do want to create Netflix type reco system for finding new TV shows.
Point taken on the search problem, I should label things better. I think when that happens when a search returns a spot on search result and I forward the user to the site page, I might add notification, something like. "Were pertty sure this is what you are looking for, so we took you straight to the shows page. If not continue searching here", something like that.
Its interesting to hear that things are so bland you weren't sure if it was a search results page or not, I will take it under advisement and review that page.
Thanks for the mad-men thing didn't see that, yea it should be the show name of that page, but tv.com only really cares about the show ID I think, the other part is for SEO I am sure.
Wow, so the new bones, old bones things is a big problem. I hadn't looked at shows that are on network, and re-runs at the same time, I thought this might come up but I imagined it wouldn't break. So I am going to look into this more, but in essence bones is on FOX, TNT, and WGNAMER and each show has a seperate show url, but because I have been trying to hack around the problem instead of deal with it headon its hard to get too all 3 show urls.
Near then end I think we get to the meat of the issue, the reason I built this site. I am pretty sure most people expect things of a TV Guide. You brought this up directly. People now even have expectations of online TV guides as you said zip codes, OTA, sattellite and so fourth.
What I have to say about this is that I am not trying to do that. They have that market covered, it would be crazy to try and do what they do, theres like at least 5 major players in that area. What I am trying to do is to turn the idea of a TV Guide on its head. Mayby I should list a set of assumtions I have, assumptions about users that would find my site usefull.
1. They don't own a TIVO
2. They watch shows live, mostly, or just want to be reminded to download latter
3. They have an on screen TV Guide of some form.
I am not going to lie, at this point in time my data is limited so trying to produce accurate times, for all the different services and zipcodes, would be imposible at this point, but besides that I looked at it as a plus not a negative.
I would go back to my original idea, I want to answer a simple question , what shows of mine are new today? If I know that my show is own, and I know that its in primetime I can look up its exact time in my on screen guide. Or you can use the link to tv.com, or imdb.
I am not saying its perfect yet, but I feel good about the direction I am headed in.
As to a channel filter. I might do something like seperate out OTA, basic cable, and expanded cable, but I wouldn't want to go anymore then that, I am not certain it would be the most helpful.
I do recognize you have an unmet need though, I am just not certain the solution you suggested is the best.
I am totally down to use some crowd wisdom to help make the site better and to provide recommendations. At this point while its not exposed at all your TV guide is public, I don't have a user list yet either. So the link you use to browser your tv guide, you could send that to a friend, mayby I should play that up.
Like I said before I wanted the bare minimum and then I am going to iterate fast.
The next thing I am actually going to create is probably a feed system. RSS, or ATOM probably, and some calendar export like ics I had a user request for that.
I would like to monetize it somehow, but I am not stressed about it. I mostly do projects like this to learn something new, and to stretch myself in places that work doesn't. I can tell you I am not sure I want those huge site takeovers I see on place like TV.com .
I want my site to be fast, really fast I try really hard on that. Right now I have two places with images, the channels page, and login screen. The star isn't an image its an html entity. At this point most pages don't even have JS on them. The rollover I have on the star is all CSS. I even remove all the whitespace from the html.
I understand the need for graphics on the show page and I will get there, but I need to investigate the least impactful way of including an image, mayby like post-loading the image or something.
Again thanks for taking the time to evaluate my site, it was really helpfull.
Great response! As for what to put on the about page, maybe just a bit more in depth about you, why you created the project, and what you're trying to do with it.
Now that I have a bit better understanding on what you're trying to do (or at least your specific problem you were solving), have you seen the RSS based TV torrent sites? They seem like they might be accomplishing at least some if not a good chunk of what you're trying to do. FeedMyTorrents is now dead (but sounds like it would've fit the bill for you) but ShowRSS seems to be alive and well (http://showrss.karmorra.info/).
Cool, I will do that.
Yes, I use eztv.it, but you can see that they aren't tracking a whole lot of TV thats out there
from showRSS
"tracking 200 shows, 1033 episodes "
currently I have in my DB about 6,000 shows, and 46,000 episodes.
Hey on a side note, I see that your using rpx, I love rpx too, but I was kinda pissed about the amount of JS they require so I looked at there code was able to rip out all the js, and you can see the result in my login area, thats basically just my version of the rpx signin box.
Oh that's pretty cool. I noticed GetSatisfaction seems to have torn apart the RPX login form the last time I logged in there as well.
I've also been thinking about switching to ClickPass as a result of some issues I had with an API change RPX made that caught me off guard resulting in some messed up user accounts...
And on a side note I really need to truncate comments and make them expandable haha! Great comments again though!