TCM Schedule Changes

Every now and then, movies get removed from the TCM lineup and replaced by something else due to rights restrictions or a movie not fitting into the time slot properly or whatnot. But this time we have a different sort of schedule change on TCM.

The web designers at TCM.com have changed the entire web-site, I'm guessing to make it more friendly to people on mobile devices, since the old format was a dickens to access on a smartphone. Unforunately, this has caused changes to the schedule page that are irritating to say the least.

As you can see, there's only room for one movie on the page -- on the desktop browser. I'm guessing that there might be more room on a smartphone that's in portrait mode instead of landscape, although regarding my tablet it's normally in landscape. The schedule scrolls under the date baner, so close to a third of the screen is taken by banners. There's also no good reason for those photos, which tke up needless space and data if you want the monthly schedule. I tried printing it to PDF, and it runs to 101 pages, with four or five movies on each page! The individual days also don't seem to mention the prime time themes.

Another bad change is that as far as I can tell there's no weekly schedule either. For the most part I'd copy the monthly schedule, paste it into Libre Office, being on Linux, and then save it as a text file. Now, trying to copy the monthly schedule and pasting it into Libre Office crashes it for me, so I have to paste into a regular text editor. But because of the minor irritation of copy/pasting the monthly schedule, I would often use the weekly schedule for the first week of the month. That seems to be gone.

Worst of all for some people is going to be that the schedules now only seem to go one month out, and you can't get future month schedules. It was often the case that the schedule would be released two-plus months out, with the schedule for this December, for example, having been released a few days before the web-site format change. Now, there doesn't seem to be any way to get a monthly schedule until the 1st of the month. As you can guess, this is a big pain for a bunch of reasons. As I said above, when I could get the weekly schedule, doing that was OK for a weekly movie recommendation post I make on another site. Now, for the weeks that span a month boundary, things are going to be a much bigger pain.

The main website has changed, too. On first viewing, I didn't see anything listing the October Star of the Month, which seems a major oversight to me. I'm sure people who access the main site more often than I do will probably notice other changes.