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February 14, 2008

Couchville Joins The Deadpool

Duncan Riley

23 comments »

TV listings site Couchville has joined the deadpool.

The service, provided by PVR software maker Snapstream, offered US TV listings via zip code and cable or satellite provider. According to Michael’s March 2007 review:

… and it shows you a simple, easy to navigate TV guide. A vertical red line shows you what’s currently on, and via an Ajax interface you can grab and drag the listings vertically (for channel) or horizontally (for time) to see more (this works much like the Google Maps interface)….It’s very simple and it’s very useful.

Michael said Couchville did one thing right, just a shame that one thing wasn’t sustainability.

(thanks to 1to10 Reviews for the tip)

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 3:04 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Pc satellite tv

    March 1st, 2008 at 9:42 am

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  1. Brian Kinney

    February 14th, 2008 at 3:20 am

    That is to bad. I didn’t use the site often but whenever I needed a convenient TV guide couchville was the first and only site I’d go to.

  2. anish

    February 14th, 2008 at 3:22 am

    There goes another one…. sad :(

    R.I.P couchville
    17-OCT-2006 - 14-FEB-2008

    Anish

  3. Jon

    February 14th, 2008 at 3:34 am

    “Michael said Couchville did one thing right, just a shame that one thing wasn’t sustainability.”

    I don’t mean to laugh at other peoples misfortunes but I love this quote… I got to remember to use it one day and not become a victim of it myself! ;-)

    Jon
    http://buzvia.com - Share Influence

  4. Ze'ev

    February 14th, 2008 at 3:52 am

    bit of a morbid fascination w/ the dead companies going on here

  5. plop

    February 14th, 2008 at 5:18 am

    yea its like the obituaries column

    plop

  6. Rakesh Agrawal (SnapStream)

    February 14th, 2008 at 6:03 am

    To be clear, SnapStream is not in the Deadpool. We just shutdown Couchville to sharpen our focus on our television search product (http://www.snapstream.com/enterprise/) and our consumer PC DVR product (http://www.snapstream.com/beyondtv/). In both of these areas, we are doing very well.

    And for those of you interested in more background on the shutdown, from our forums posting about the shutdown:

    “From a product strategy standpoint, a web-based program guide is kind of a tease. Sure you get to read information about TV shows, but you don’t get the TV shows themselves. As more and more stuff is available through web, what people are using the web for (when it comes to television) is, well, *watching* television shows. And I’m not saying that there aren’t people who use web-based program guides every day and get a lot of value out of them — there are, but it’s not an increasing number of people. We had ideas for Couchville that would take it beyond just a program guide. We thought about turning it into a social network so people could connect around TV shows that they watched. We thought about making it so users could edit program guide data to make it better a la imbd (and in turn use that better data in Beyond TV). We thought about making it the best online program guide for DVR owners (ie integration with different DVRs, including Beyond TV). So there were lots of ideas but when the business model for Couchville came under pressure in the past few months, when we realized that we couldn’t keep doing it as a hobby and had to make a decision to really get behind it or abandon it and we decided on the latter in favor of focusing on our PC DVR software.”

  7. jccalhoun

    February 14th, 2008 at 6:14 am

    It stinks that couchville is gone. It was the only decent online tv listings I was aware of.

  8. Prerna

    February 14th, 2008 at 6:20 am

    Everyone wants content not just listing Enjoy Movies only @ http://moviemazic.com

  9. brandon

    February 14th, 2008 at 7:37 am

    For time warner cable customers this does the same without the set top box integration: http://www.timewarnercable.com.....levelid=16

    looks better too

  10. dhario

    February 14th, 2008 at 7:38 am

    couchville was great, but never capitalized on its assets. its great that it was a quick n’ easy guide, but you can’t back yourself on the back and say to yourself “whew — that was hard work — we’re outta here.” After its release NOTHING changed — no functionality was added. I thought there were LOTS of interesting things they could’ve done. Maybe Snapstream wasn’t willing to take the risks or couldn’t get the necessary partnerships.

  11. DC

    February 14th, 2008 at 7:40 am

    What a stupid idea for a service / business…

    1) Login
    2) Look up show (with whizzy web wonder)
    3) Go to TV
    4) Find show
    5) Watch show

    Had they not heard of digital cable or satellite or TiVo? Just because something is all Ajaxy doesn’t mean squat. If the same interface were on a DVR, maybe it’d be something cool to crow about, but a website dedicated to TV listings (and not having any original content) seems like selling hot to the sun.

  12. Steven Finch

    February 14th, 2008 at 7:58 am

    When is Techcrunch going to get a real deadpool list happening?

  13. adam

    February 14th, 2008 at 8:14 am

    Couchville was the only useful way to find out what’s on TV. Shame, it’s dead.

  14. sodapop

    February 14th, 2008 at 9:15 am

    Not knocking CV’s tool. But, come on. There are like 1000 tv listing sites out there. How can any company really expect to become a leader when there are so many big players already. Yahoo has a decent one. TV.COM, tvguide.com - probably MSN… I use Titiantv.com. Its compatible with my Mac dvr software EyeTV.

  15. Brian Breslin

    February 14th, 2008 at 9:25 am

    why didn’t they turn the listings into something more valuable.
    wonder if they’d sell the site, can’t cost much to keep running right?

  16. Luke

    February 14th, 2008 at 11:47 am

    I actually think it was a great idea and I was sad to hear that it’s gone. I don’t have digital cable here at the University and it made it really easy to look up when my shows were on.

  17. cease

    February 14th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    by far the best listings ever

    every other site like meevee, and tv.yahoo.com… try to jam other crap .. i just want listings fast. no other content.

  18. FaveBot

    February 14th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    The real problem with the TV listings space — and why there’s so little innovation — is the ridiculous fees charged by the two firms (Tribune & Gemstar) who monopolize the U.S. TV listings market. They want a minimum if $11,000 per month for the data! It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the real reason that Couchville was shut down was b/c of those data charges. If there was ever an industry that needed to be disrupted this is it.

  19. Matt

    February 15th, 2008 at 2:44 am

    Rakesh,
    Thanks for your explanation. I think you have a good user base, i think you guys did poor job in advertising about your product. I heard about couchville via techcrunch, i hear abt its RIP through techcrunch. You had a very good product and me personally loved it. It was faster than choosing channel 99 on my remote.
    Hey, it would be nice if you could leave it there and just support dont add any bells or whistles.

  20. Alex

    February 15th, 2008 at 7:15 am

    It’s a shame to lose Couchville. It was a great site that I used every day. A very well done site.

  21. Rakesh Agrawal (SnapStream)

    February 15th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    Favebot: Ding ding ding!

  22. FaveBot

    February 15th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    Rakesh,

    Thanks for the confirmation. I knew it!

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