Doing One Thing Right: Couchville

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1. Ivan Pope
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:11 am

   You’ve added an extra ‘e’ to make ‘Coucheville’ here, and done the same thing to the URL which has broken the link - should be http://couchville.com

2. trevo
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:30 am

   I find this a little underwhelming. Google maps has a drag feature because it makes sense, maps are boundless. This feature can easily be achieved with scrollbars since there’s only 24hours a day and a limited number of channels.

   Also look at Google’s finance charts, they are also draggable, but they add innovations that make sense to the topic such as the ability to arbitrarily define the window of time within the charts.

3. Michael Arrington
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:34 am

   Thanks Ivan.

4. Michael Arrington
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:35 am

   Trevo - I’ve seen a lot of tv guides, and this is the easiest I’ve seen to navigate. I agree it’s no huge breakthrough, but I like showing apps that do something well.

5. visible.mobi
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:51 am

   I tried the service and its quite nice.

6. Stan Schroeder
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 1:56 am

   The first thing I’ve tried resulted in a Runtime error. I assume that the service only works for US citizens, but still, it shouldn’t be giving errors if you type in a non-US zip code.

7. Michael Arrington
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 2:07 am

   Stan - I agree.

8. weaverluke
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 2:09 am

   In the UK we have the excellent tvGuide. I consult it nightly!

9. TvFan
   

   March 5th, 2007 at 3:58 am

   Also try http://titantv.com It sounds like that site and couchville offer much of the same things.

10. tomb
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 3:59 am

    well designed! nice ui, guys.

11. Noem
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 4:41 am

    I’m in Canada and it works great! Nice to see something that works up here

12. John
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 5:43 am

    Ah! Thanks for posting this. Since Yahoo! redesigned I’ve been scrambling to find a nice simple provider of TV Listings. Also in Canada, the MSN site which is a little better (it actually lets me select my provider) doesn’t work in Firefox(MAC).

    I still wish someone would just go back to the incredibly long scrolling page though. It is *so* much faster than any of the javascript/ajax solutions. Why? Because the Movie channels are up in the 300s and there really is nothing simpler than dragging the browser scrollbar.

    Next-Gen TV listings: A prime example of trying to hit a nail with sledgehammer.

13. Rakesh Agrawal
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 7:12 am

    John, I’m the founder of SnapStream (the company that built Couchville). The long scrolling page thing doesn’t work so well. Going this route requires a lot of data to be passed from the server down to the client (typically more than what a user will actually use in a session) and the result is a slow site.

    Stan, if you click through to my blog (http://rake.sh/) you’ll find my contact information in the right margin. Please e-mail me what you did to produce the run-time error — I’d like to understand what the problem was and fix it if we can figure it out. I did some quick tests entering nonsense into the zipcode / postal code field on the config page (http://couchville.com/config/) but couldn’t reproduce any runtime errors.

14. The Khuc
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 7:45 am

    Very nice service and simple and easy to use UI. Always nice to see a .NET AJAX application.

15. Randy
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 7:47 am

    This is just a clone of the Guide software the comes with Elgato’s EyeTV products.

16. Eric Anderson
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    I agree completely with John. When I try to “drag and drop” the interface crawls because the browser is not designed for highly interactive interaction like that. Now admitly I have a slow machine compared to the standards today (3 year old tablet PC with just a 1 GHz processor) but many people don’t have the latest hardware also. Plus on the old TV Guide listings you didn’t have to have a fancy piece of hardware to look at the tv listings. The browser was capable of scrolling a long page fine. Need to go to a different day? Just click a link and load up a new page.

    Yes it is not as snazzy but it is much more practical and much more usable by a larger portion of the internet.

17. mathew
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 8:11 am

    Here’s what I want from an online TV guide service:

    1. I want to be able to tell it what channels I get. i.e. OTA HD, plus the specific DirecTV package I get. Surprising how many TV guide sites won’t let me do that, and end up missing the HD channels and showing me stuff on channels I don’t get like Boomerang.

    2. I want to be able to tell it keywords I’m interested in, and have it search the channels I actually get for those keywords.

    3. I want it to supply the result as an Atom feed. The feed should give a summary line of something like [Channel] [Show] [Episode] with the show date in the date field of the item and the show summary in the text of the item.

    There. All very obvious, but as far as I know nobody’s done it yet.

18. John
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    Nice tv listings site. Its simple, easy to navigate and does what it does well. I also used to use Yahoo tv listings, but Yahoo has pretty much messed that one up.

19. Colin Dowling
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 8:24 am

    I like the interface and think it is relatively easy to use. That said, I don’t often try to see what’s on TV by looking on my computer. Usually, I click “Guide” on the remote and it just tells me.

20. matt
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 8:39 am

    It would be nice if the dragging was a little more “fluid.” The guide kept jittering when I was dragging which got really annoying. I think I’d prefer some kind of scrollbars instead.

    I have to say, though, as simple as the vertical red line is, it’s actually really nice to have.

21. Dave Zatz
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 9:29 am

    For folks with issues, remember that this service is still in beta.

    As far as guide data goes, most originates from the same few places (which is why Randy may have noticed similarities in listings) and is syndicated for a fee.

    I’ve gotten to know the founder/CEO of SnapStream as an advertiser on my site. He’s a smart dude with tons of great ideas, so I really hope the final product takes off for him.

22. MetroBellevue
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 10:12 am

    Very nice and super easy-to-use. I like it very much!

23. rack pallet
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 10:24 am

    Great idea, no I just want to upgrade to a TUNER card on my laptop, Get a 300 gig Hard - Drive….

    - then start recording my stuff, off my direcTV connection at my house when Im not at home ….

    - then again wouldn’t that just be a $3k Tivo? -

    - when companies re-invent the wheel we need to re invent how we form companies and how companies get funded. = - Rb

24. TV Guide Guy
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 11:10 am

    Most of this stuff is also available at http://www.tvguide.com on the listings grid, along with a wealth of information and community data on TV shows. TV Guide also recently bought some of the assets and technology of a company called eVoke TV which offers a similar, easy-to-use interface.

25. Josh
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 11:50 am

    This is nice, and leagues better than Yahoo. But when Yahoo went stupid I switched to AOL, and I don’t think Couchville is going to make me switch.

    AOL’s TV listing’s page (http://tvlistings.aol.com/) loads the entire set at once (no waiting for the page to catch up while you scroll), doesn’t use any annoying flash or cutesy animations, is fast, easy to read, easy to navigate, and does what it should: shows you whats on TV right now (or whenever) quickly and simply.

    In my opinion, AOL’s product is still the best on the web (followed by TVGuide.com and then perhaps Couchville… MeeVee and Yahoo bring up the rear).

26. Jeremy Kandah
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    booo, no scroll bars = annoying… tvguide.com

27. Triona Carey
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    I blogged about typos on this item earlier today - glad to see that a comment resulted in corrected URL but the coucheville thing still hasn’t gone away I’m afraid. Process, detail = accuracy.

28. Huser
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    OMG, i can’t believe people like this Triona asshole exist.

29. Drew
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    I’m surprised there is no way to set email reminders for your favorite shows.

30. Bruce
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    you should check out tvplanner from comcast. http://www.tvplanner.net . It has a nice ajx interface and filters by hd. It also allows for search of Comcast’s VOD

31. JD
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

    This is fantastic.

32. pwb
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    I think it’s pretty nice. I wonder if they would be able to add scroll bars and/or scroll wheel support and still enable the Gmaps-style dragging? The AOL and TVGuide versions are not bad. Yahoo’s is horrible. TitanTV isn’t so great anymore.

33. theleafs
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    this is great….and done the way it should be; that is easy usability and effective graphics

34. Shawn Lockheart
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 7:31 pm

    This is pretty cool. It’s ashame it only grabs network channels though, but I imagine that’s more of an issue with cable than anything. I’d like to just one day use a site like Couchville to browse all of my channels, literally all of them. HBO, Cinemax, Starz, etc. — Either way, it’s definitely simple to use.

35. Narendra
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    I can’t believe that this genre hasn’t yet sorted itself out.

    1) The grid is dead. The new guide should be an exact replica of the wishlist feature from TiVo. Tell me when shows are going to air so I can record them or download them afterwards.

    2) Offer RSS so that this data can live outside the app.

    3) Point to the top 3 content sites for that show where you can join in the community or read more.

    It is that simple and no one has done this yet.

36. Rakesh Agrawal
    

    March 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    Shawn: Couchville isn’t limited to just network channels. It’ll show you all of your TV channels including the premium stuff, movie channels, etc.

37. its4us2think
    

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:55 am

    I cannot make it to work, when I visit the site (couchville.com), I get this error ” params.referringPage is null or not an object”, I cannot work around this issue what ever way I try it.

38. Jojo
    

    March 6th, 2007 at 2:23 am

    Couchville doesn’t work for me. Just sits there doing nothing after I put in my zip code.

    TitanTV & TV Planner work fine though. Thanks.

39. John F
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 11:58 am

    The john from #12 not #18.

    Rakesh: I realize the technical reason to want to split the data up, but as a person who (tries to) frequently use TV listings (I keep one in my links bar) , the all-results-on-one-page is a *lot* more usable than the current trend of trying to ajaxify/split the data. It may be slower to initially load the screen, but then it’s super fast and easy for me once I get the data, so for me the long scrolling page thing (what Yahoo! had) works better than any current solution by far. On the upside Rakesh, yours is one of the better of this new (and useless to me) generation of TV Listings.

    TV Guide guy: Boo! No Canada.

    AOL Canada: Boo! No TV Listings.

    Narendra: The grid is dead for you, not for me. I love the grid, I want more grid not less.

40. Steven
    

    March 17th, 2007 at 11:32 pm

    i prefer a single fixed price/song - just like apple’s
    why should popularity of a song affect price/download?
    doesn’t make sense to me

    http://www.allpdfconverter.com