Nice new cardigan for Demand Five

Just added Channel 5's service "Demand Five". Another one that required some painful HTML scraping so could be fragile. No categories either. I think we may have to bite the bullet and add categories to this and ITV ourselves.

Over the Top

I'm quite excited about a user interface change I've just made live. I came up with it after thinking through how I interact with Tank Top TV, and in particular what I find awkward about it. I think I've solved a genuine problem with the interface.

So its now even easier and more fun to find out what you can watch on 4oD, BBC iPlayer and ITVPlayer.

Oh, and I won't tell you what the UI change is - you'll just have to go and look!

Render unto Caesar

This bloke called Julius and his adopted son Octavian had a pretty big impact: we still talk about the "Tzar" of this or that.

But I was thinking about rendering and templating. Am I kidding myself to believe there has to be a better way? Time to investigate...

Performance Anxiety

Although even for the longest list of programmes the underlying SQL queries take a small fraction of a second, rendering this and displaying it can take up to 30s. This is because we've used a Web framework to develop Tank Top that makes it easy and quick to develop, but compromises on performance.

In any case I've found some ways to simplify how we render the programme lists, using fewer fancy features from the framework. Things are much faster now. But I'd still like an order of magnitude improvement. I'd like some more headroom so we can add more features to the interface without fear of running out of puff.

Peering into the Tank

Just added search - you can now find programmes from BBC iPlayer, 4oD or ITVPlayer by typing in all or part of the name.

4oD floats to the Top of the Tank

4oD is back on TankTop. There's so much content it is a little overwhelming. We'll need to think if there's a better way of handling it, but there's a wonderful range of programmes.

Watching not blocking

Based on some of the initial feedback on our survey we've changed some of our terminology - instead of telling us whether or not you want to block a programme, channel or category, you simply indicate whether you watch it or not. Let us know if you think this makes more sense (or not!)

Where, when and why do you watch online TV?

We've created a small survey to help us better understand your use of online TV and what you think of Tank Top TV. We'd love your input. It'll only take five minutes...

Yes, take me to the survey!

Thinking outside the Tank

4oD are thinking like Tank Top. I suspect everyone in on-line TV content is or should be thinking about how to connect people with content when the concept of "Programming" a channel finally dies out.

So, how best to improve your iPlayer, ITVPlayer and 4oD viewing experience? The overall vision is to present you with stuff you want to watch with as little friction as possible. How to achieve this? The obvious first step is to fix the 4oD feed..., but what next?

I think sorting out categories across the channels could be a dull but important task. At the moment we don't have categories for ITV and this makes the ITV content diffcult to manage. There's also a challenge with BBC versus C4 approaches to categories. The BBC categories are heirachical (e.g. sport, football strictly for the sport of football, and never combining football with non-sport categories like comedy). so you need to exclude a programme if any of its categories are excluded, but C4 is different. C4 would mark a Comedy about football as (sport, football, comedy), so if you like all comedy but don't want to watch football the sport then using the approach used with the BBC doesn't do the job.

I think we'll need to study the categorisation used by each channel and try to map each to our own scheme. Trying to do this without requiring regular manual work will be the challenge.

Longer term determining when users have similar watching habits could yield interesting results. We really could do with more users though to make this worthwhile. I'm beginning to suspect that its quite difficult to 'get' what tanktop.tv can do for you - we need to think of ways of making it easier and more obvious.

Tracking what you've watched

One feature I've wanted to implement for a while is now up and running. Tanktop.tv now tracks what episodes you've watched on BBC iPlayer, ITVPlayer and 4oD and filters them out. This happens automatically when you click on a link to leave tanktop and watch the episode, but you can also set it manually by clicking on a tick or cross next to the episode.

As well as reducing the time it takes you to find something new to watch, I'm looking forward to getting enough data to be able to see what people really like, not just what they think they like. Do I really want to admit to watching nothing but Top Gear, Robin Hood and crazy diet-obsessed car crash TV, never getting around to watching Sky at Night or Horizon?