Sunday, December 27, 2015

Request for information

What website do you use on your computer to get schedule information?

Originally, I used to use Zap2It, as they had a nice schedule that was almost in the old-fashioned HTML table style so that it loaded easily. And if you clicked on an individual channel to get that one channel's schedule, you'd get the two-week schedule in one long list you could scroll up and down, which made finding an entire set of programming for one channel exceedingly easy. But a few years back, they redesigned their website to focus more on TV gossip and made the schedule more difficult to navigate. Finding one's customized channel lineup became a pain in the ass.

So I started using TitanTV. Their schedule design wasn't quite as good, and if you wantd one channel, you could only get three days at a time and had to click through to get future days. They now have a "14-day" option, but it only shows a three-hour period for each of the 14 days. However, there's something far worse about TitanTV, which is that it seems to add arbitrary channels to my custom channel lineup. As a DirecTV subscriber and a movie buff, I've got a custom lineup of TCM, FXM, and the premium movie channels in the 500s, and nothing else. But if I don't use the cutsom lineup for a while (I generally use it once a week), I find that other channels start creeping in to the formerly customized lineup, to the point that I get a whole bunch of unwanted cruft and removing that is exceedingly tedious.

Most of the websites have the same information, since there are two or three companies that aggregate all of the schedule information and deliver it to the schedule sites or your box guide. But I'd like something that's efficient, not tablet-optimized, and not full of social networking garbage. (Really, who wants to "like" an "edit your customized channel lineup" page?) Any good ideas?

No comments: