A month ago we found it necessary to discontinue the old program guide data service (Tribune Media) and introduce to our site a program guide provided by TVGuide. Change invariably produces rough-edged comments and, while many of you were supportive, others were less-than enthused. They believed we had regrettably...
[url=http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/news/2007/10/a_month_ago_we.php]Read the Full Article[/url]
TVGuide vs. "Old" Program Guide
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Dale
- Publisher / Author
- Posts: 259
- Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2004 4:59 pm
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hdtvjim
- Member
- Posts: 20
- Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 9:14 pm
New Vs. Old Program Guide
Dale,
I know things change, but at the moment, the "New" TV Guide is a poor replacement for the "old" programing guide at this time.
As an example the new programing guide doesn't give me a description of the content or the last air date and it doesn't filter out all the standard def programing.
I know it took a lot of work to get the bugs out of the old programing guide. Are we going to have to go through that again? I hope not.
For me the old programing guide was something unique to HDTV Magazine. But at the moment my Dish Network Electronic Guide seems to have the edge over the new HDTV Magazine programing guide.
Let's all hope that the "New" HDTV programing guide can be brought up to and become equal or better than the old programing guide in the not to distant future.
HDTVJim
I know things change, but at the moment, the "New" TV Guide is a poor replacement for the "old" programing guide at this time.
As an example the new programing guide doesn't give me a description of the content or the last air date and it doesn't filter out all the standard def programing.
I know it took a lot of work to get the bugs out of the old programing guide. Are we going to have to go through that again? I hope not.
For me the old programing guide was something unique to HDTV Magazine. But at the moment my Dish Network Electronic Guide seems to have the edge over the new HDTV Magazine programing guide.
Let's all hope that the "New" HDTV programing guide can be brought up to and become equal or better than the old programing guide in the not to distant future.
HDTVJim
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Roger Halstead
- Major Contributor
- Posts: 210
- Joined: Sun Feb 26, 2006 4:13 pm
Program Guide now a pay feature.
I wondered why I could no longer find the program guide. Now I find it's become a pay feature. With the comments on the quality I can't see paying even a couple dollars a month to view an inferior product as I already have two other subscriptions that provide guides with out charging for them and they are better than what I've seen from the TVguide.
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videograbber
- Major Contributor
- Posts: 146
- Joined: Fri Sep 24, 2004 7:10 am
New Lamps for Old? (or, how Aladdin lost his wishes)
I'm with hdtvJim all the way on this. His comment, 'the "New" TV Guide is a poor replacement for the "old" programing guide' is a masterpiece of understatement.
Dale wrote:
> whatever features and services we had with the old vendor we can soon-enough have with TVGuide. <
I don't understand this comment. The only 'features and services' you got from the old vendor was raw guide data. They didn't provide any of the special features on the web site... that was all Shane's work. This makes it sound like you can get a data feed from them (TVG), instead of TMS, and just put your old pages back up again. Which would be a great thing. However...
> they assure me that they will incorporate your good recommendations into their product and meet their own goal of making TVGuide the superior product among all others. <
this sounds like they plan to re-implement the wheel themselves, all over again. I'm not sure what the point is? As I wrote to Shane (private correspondence) earlier this month:
That's not hard at all. Just look at what HDTV Magazine already had. I hate to get all technical, but... Duh! Do they really need US to tell them what was good about it?
The main thing that ANY guide will need to be both useful and competitive in today's marketplace is to provide information in a variety of views that make it simple to find or discover the information we need, faster and easier. The basic grid is fine for starters, but HDTV Magazine augmented that with automatic info hover-pops(tm) with (nearly) everything you'd need to know for a particular show. (You did have to click on it to see Future Airings.) A "Channel-View", with all the shows for a particular channel for 2-weeks was a bonus we already had (though it lacked the auto-popup feature in that context.) The direct links to IMDB for extended movie info were great.
A "Vertical view", to complement the current Horizontal view could be very useful at times. And other ways to eliminate or minimize scrolling (e.g. a "What's On Now" view, with a multicolumn listing of all channels on one page, right now, so no scrolling is required). The ability to highlight HD, or hide SD items completely is a no-brainer. Plus new ways to browse and find information in the vast number of stations we have available today, from a variety of sources (some of us have satellite, cable, AND OTA sources... all fully supported in the "old" guide). The Movie Guide was a unique start on being able to mine and present program information in a truly useful fashion, generating listings of a specified channel or set of channels, with subsets of programming types (movies, episodic, sporting events, etc.), sorted by Title (with all extra airings on the side), or by Time (with all airings inline), etc. Ways to explore and link between shows by relationships (additional airings, specific genres, particular actors, etc.) would make for powerful assistants.
The problem is that TVG (and most others) are inside a box (the grid), and need to start thinking outside the box. I (and others) could suggest numerous innovative and unique and, frankly, logical extrapolations. [And TVG would probably go and patent them, and sue everyone else into paying royaltes on them. Recall that TVG (GemStar) is the one who "invented" the grid-view, aka, ran to the Patent Office before anyone realized there was any reason to concern themselves with anything so blatently obvious. And the reason why you won't find a grid on a TiVo. Thank goodness they didn't patent "the List"... what a concept!]
hdtvJim really nailed it on the head with his comment:
> I know it took a lot of work to get the bugs out of the old programing guide. Are we going to have to go through that again? <
If so (and it certainly sounds like it), why expend the effort? There are numerous other sources readily available (Excite, Zap2It, TitanTV, etc.) and ALL of them exist right now, and ALL are superior to the lame TVG variant that's currently on the HDTV Magazine site. These examples have been available for a long time, and if TVG really had a commitment to "making TVGuide the superior product among all others", they wouldn't be bringing up the rear in this race, this late in the game.
As much as I respect both Dale and Shane, and value HDTV Magazine, (and in spite of the untold hours I spent during the last 3 years on the "old guide" doing exactly what Dale is soliciting on the new one), I just don't see the point. Unless TVG can leverage off the fine work that Shane already did, and take advantage of what was accomplished there, it would make more sense to me to just scrap the Guide completely. That's just one man's opinion, and I appreciate having the open Forum here to express it in, even though I'm sure it's not what anyone wants to hear.
- Tim
Dale wrote:
> whatever features and services we had with the old vendor we can soon-enough have with TVGuide. <
I don't understand this comment. The only 'features and services' you got from the old vendor was raw guide data. They didn't provide any of the special features on the web site... that was all Shane's work. This makes it sound like you can get a data feed from them (TVG), instead of TMS, and just put your old pages back up again. Which would be a great thing. However...
> they assure me that they will incorporate your good recommendations into their product and meet their own goal of making TVGuide the superior product among all others. <
this sounds like they plan to re-implement the wheel themselves, all over again. I'm not sure what the point is? As I wrote to Shane (private correspondence) earlier this month:
> They do need your feedback in order to know what you want and how you want it. <I know you put a lot of work into your system, to not only make it the best, but also provide unique capabilities, available no-where else. Where else can I find instantaneous info popups, just by hovering over a program? Nowhere. It's click, and wait, which can take 10x+ as long to get the info you want. Or an 8-hour grid (on my 1920x1200 screen)? Or the ability to pop up a full 2-week view for any channel? Or mixing channels from multiple sources all on a unified grid?
Or what I relied on the most, the Movie Guide, to generate listings of any selected set of channels, and type of content, sorted by Title or Date. This mechanism to access a database of info (subset, sort, etc.) was really "cruising through an information space", and a big aid in managing information complexity. Or all the customizability you provided (profile editing)? Even original air-date info on the popups? All gone now.
That's not hard at all. Just look at what HDTV Magazine already had. I hate to get all technical, but... Duh! Do they really need US to tell them what was good about it?
The main thing that ANY guide will need to be both useful and competitive in today's marketplace is to provide information in a variety of views that make it simple to find or discover the information we need, faster and easier. The basic grid is fine for starters, but HDTV Magazine augmented that with automatic info hover-pops(tm) with (nearly) everything you'd need to know for a particular show. (You did have to click on it to see Future Airings.) A "Channel-View", with all the shows for a particular channel for 2-weeks was a bonus we already had (though it lacked the auto-popup feature in that context.) The direct links to IMDB for extended movie info were great.
A "Vertical view", to complement the current Horizontal view could be very useful at times. And other ways to eliminate or minimize scrolling (e.g. a "What's On Now" view, with a multicolumn listing of all channels on one page, right now, so no scrolling is required). The ability to highlight HD, or hide SD items completely is a no-brainer. Plus new ways to browse and find information in the vast number of stations we have available today, from a variety of sources (some of us have satellite, cable, AND OTA sources... all fully supported in the "old" guide). The Movie Guide was a unique start on being able to mine and present program information in a truly useful fashion, generating listings of a specified channel or set of channels, with subsets of programming types (movies, episodic, sporting events, etc.), sorted by Title (with all extra airings on the side), or by Time (with all airings inline), etc. Ways to explore and link between shows by relationships (additional airings, specific genres, particular actors, etc.) would make for powerful assistants.
The problem is that TVG (and most others) are inside a box (the grid), and need to start thinking outside the box. I (and others) could suggest numerous innovative and unique and, frankly, logical extrapolations. [And TVG would probably go and patent them, and sue everyone else into paying royaltes on them. Recall that TVG (GemStar) is the one who "invented" the grid-view, aka, ran to the Patent Office before anyone realized there was any reason to concern themselves with anything so blatently obvious. And the reason why you won't find a grid on a TiVo. Thank goodness they didn't patent "the List"... what a concept!]
hdtvJim really nailed it on the head with his comment:
> I know it took a lot of work to get the bugs out of the old programing guide. Are we going to have to go through that again? <
If so (and it certainly sounds like it), why expend the effort? There are numerous other sources readily available (Excite, Zap2It, TitanTV, etc.) and ALL of them exist right now, and ALL are superior to the lame TVG variant that's currently on the HDTV Magazine site. These examples have been available for a long time, and if TVG really had a commitment to "making TVGuide the superior product among all others", they wouldn't be bringing up the rear in this race, this late in the game.
As much as I respect both Dale and Shane, and value HDTV Magazine, (and in spite of the untold hours I spent during the last 3 years on the "old guide" doing exactly what Dale is soliciting on the new one), I just don't see the point. Unless TVG can leverage off the fine work that Shane already did, and take advantage of what was accomplished there, it would make more sense to me to just scrap the Guide completely. That's just one man's opinion, and I appreciate having the open Forum here to express it in, even though I'm sure it's not what anyone wants to hear.
- Tim
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Dale
- Publisher / Author
- Posts: 259
- Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2004 4:59 pm
HDTV Magazine's guide effort
A $50,000 per year cash loss for the last three years forced us out of the raw data contract with Tribune Media Services. There are only two guide providers that can hope to meet your demands. One is Tribune and the other TVGuide. Each have different business models. Tribune relies upon payment from every site they serve on an ala carte basis while TVGuide places templates upon affiliate sites and lives on the accumulated advertising. After 3 years and $100,000 ++ of losses it was clear that our readers would never support the Tribune model. There are numerous ways to find your programming from your local newspapers and your service providers. Rather than growing as a constant percentage of newly installed sets our revenue and total users shrank every year. There has never been enough page views for advertising to coming even close to paying for it.
While it would be convenient for us to market (or even give) Shane's excellent software to TVGuide so that the familiar HDTV Magazine guide configuration would appear as before. But the data from TVGuide (which could be purchased separately as with Tribune) is not compatible. Field names and other descriptors differ and this makes a rewriting of our code a must if it is to be usable. Shane may want to step in here with more technical information to help both you and I understand why they cannot just use our software and dump data into it as we had in the past.
The good news is that it is still early in this transition from Tribune to TVGuide and TVGuide has expressed a strong desire and commitment to provide all what you loved about our Tribune powered guide. I have suggested in my last memo that you readers express your wants and ideas to us and we pass them on to TVGuide for consideration and inclusion. That is so we may use your voice in effecting this transformation of TVGuide. Using your voice is vastly superior to any constant badgering by Shane and myself asking incessantly for still another change. I sent over 15 separate requests for changes today all under the authorship of you readers and not one stone was placed under the saddle in the process. They accepted it graciously as coming from their all-important and essential consumers and not from some egoist trying to look good. The wheel may be reinvented, as you suggested, but I think we will see the forces of evolution making improvements over our last model. Give it some time. It took Shane nearly five years to bring us the first grid guide.
One last thing: Do I wish that the original guide had sold a sufficient number of subscriptions to break even or more? Of course I did as well did Shane. But no matter what attractions we put in our offering we realized less and less for our efforts. When a market isn't there, it just isn't there. I still have a nagging feeling that our guide was simply not properly discovered and I have foreseen the day of millions of media rooms that will have separate screens for different functions and one of those functions could well be the Internet supplied display of our superior guide. But that belief is still in the making rather than confirmed by dollars and cents.
Dale
While it would be convenient for us to market (or even give) Shane's excellent software to TVGuide so that the familiar HDTV Magazine guide configuration would appear as before. But the data from TVGuide (which could be purchased separately as with Tribune) is not compatible. Field names and other descriptors differ and this makes a rewriting of our code a must if it is to be usable. Shane may want to step in here with more technical information to help both you and I understand why they cannot just use our software and dump data into it as we had in the past.
The good news is that it is still early in this transition from Tribune to TVGuide and TVGuide has expressed a strong desire and commitment to provide all what you loved about our Tribune powered guide. I have suggested in my last memo that you readers express your wants and ideas to us and we pass them on to TVGuide for consideration and inclusion. That is so we may use your voice in effecting this transformation of TVGuide. Using your voice is vastly superior to any constant badgering by Shane and myself asking incessantly for still another change. I sent over 15 separate requests for changes today all under the authorship of you readers and not one stone was placed under the saddle in the process. They accepted it graciously as coming from their all-important and essential consumers and not from some egoist trying to look good. The wheel may be reinvented, as you suggested, but I think we will see the forces of evolution making improvements over our last model. Give it some time. It took Shane nearly five years to bring us the first grid guide.
One last thing: Do I wish that the original guide had sold a sufficient number of subscriptions to break even or more? Of course I did as well did Shane. But no matter what attractions we put in our offering we realized less and less for our efforts. When a market isn't there, it just isn't there. I still have a nagging feeling that our guide was simply not properly discovered and I have foreseen the day of millions of media rooms that will have separate screens for different functions and one of those functions could well be the Internet supplied display of our superior guide. But that belief is still in the making rather than confirmed by dollars and cents.
Dale
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fmaia
- New Member
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Wed Sep 08, 2004 12:45 pm
- Location: Arington, TX
FROM A LONG TIME READER
I am one of your first subscribers ...going back to 2000 (I think). I paid $35 for a lifetime subscription which was your rate back then. Your associate (a fellow named "Howard") and you assured me that no matter what, my charter subscription would be honored. Well, it was not and I dropped out. I do not know what happened internally at your organization, but it left many of your loyal subscribers wondering how and who comes up with your business models. We were never told the details. I hope history is not repeating itself. Something is wrong in the front office.
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jvrichards
- New Member
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sat Jul 16, 2005 8:06 pm
TV Guide
I would like to see a way to get what I was getting before. I was getting a daily email with only the channels I selected and it was restricted to HD programming. It's that simple. When I look at TV Guide I don't see any indication that a program is in HD - so that's the first problem. Then there is the matter of customization - the ability to select only the channels I want.
Thanks,
Jim Richards
Thanks,
Jim Richards
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randybot
- Member
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:11 am
- Location: Atlanta, GA
From another long time reader amd esrly subscriber
:roll:fmaia 25 Oct 2007 06:24 am
I am one of your first subscribers ...going back to 2000 (I think). I paid $35 for a lifetime subscription which was your rate back then. Your associate (a fellow named "Howard") and you assured me that no matter what, my charter subscription would be honored. Well, it was not and I dropped out. I do not know what happened internally at your organization, but it left many of your loyal subscribers wondering how and who comes up with your business models. We were never told the details. I hope history is not repeating itself. Something is wrong in the front office.
Dale,
I too am a long time reader and lifetime subscriber. This guy (or girl) has obviously never run a business of their own. Business models change, and you are not a charity. If he came on board in 2000, he got his money's worth many times over before he was ever asked for any additional money to keep your services going. I have been more than happy to ante up the modest additional fees that you have requested over the years, as the information that I have gotten has been been worth every penny of it.
Keep on doing what you are doing, and do what you have to do to stay in business. I am guessing that most of us long-timers are with you 100%.
Randy Botnick
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bradtothebone
- Member
- Posts: 34
- Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2004 12:12 pm
TV Guide - No comments because it doesn't work!
Dale,
I've already reported to Shane that the new guide, for some reason, doesn't work at all with my browser (Internet Explorer 6.0, SP2). That is, when I input my Zip code and provider info, it comes back with a blank screen (actually the Zip/provider input screen).
I'd be happy to provide input on the product if I can see it! :wink:
Brad
I've already reported to Shane that the new guide, for some reason, doesn't work at all with my browser (Internet Explorer 6.0, SP2). That is, when I input my Zip code and provider info, it comes back with a blank screen (actually the Zip/provider input screen).
I'd be happy to provide input on the product if I can see it! :wink:
Brad
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jeffbrad
- Member
- Posts: 13
- Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2004 6:16 am
One More... From another long time reader and early subscrib
From another long-time 'life-time' subscriber, happy to contribute every year...
I couldn't agree more with Randy about the necessary business model changes over the years. Frankly, I was impressed that you guys stuck with the goal... to provide (and in some cases, access to) the best HDTV information & guidance available. I have quite an HDTV investment, based in no small part to information from the magazine and it's subscribers. And, I'm happy with the result (not sure I'm done yet, so I'll continue to look to you all). Thanks to everyone.
HDTV Magazine continues to be much more than a Program Guide.
I can also say that I miss most of the same guide features already mentioned:
I couldn't agree more with Randy about the necessary business model changes over the years. Frankly, I was impressed that you guys stuck with the goal... to provide (and in some cases, access to) the best HDTV information & guidance available. I have quite an HDTV investment, based in no small part to information from the magazine and it's subscribers. And, I'm happy with the result (not sure I'm done yet, so I'll continue to look to you all). Thanks to everyone.
HDTV Magazine continues to be much more than a Program Guide.
I can also say that I miss most of the same guide features already mentioned:
- My control over the channels displayed, including the order.
The additional detailed program information (is it HD, first-run date, etc.).
The multi-week look-ahead for movies / programs.
Jeff Bradley