Tank Top TV

Improvements to your dashboard

2010-02-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

Your dashboard shows you recommended programmes, online TV shows you've recently seen, and your favourite shows if there's an episode available online for you to watch.

You'll see you can now mark any of the listed programmes in your dashboard as favourites, or indicate that you don't watch them, directly from the dashboard page - which saves clicking on the programme to do it.

Seesaw

2010-02-17T07:14:00.000-08:00

Seesaw has launched and looks like a nice aggregation of content from BBC, 4oD and Five (no ITV though). I've got to hand it to them, it's a nice-looking site. But, fans of Tank Top TV, remember that it's only here you'll get

personalized programme recommendations
reminders about new episodes of your favourites
your own list of what's on, tailored to your own tastes.

Stick with us, you know it makes sense!

Hello FrequencyCast!

2010-02-02T02:03:00.000-08:00

A shout out to the folks at FrequencyCast who produce a highly enjoyable podcast about digital TV and other technology. We know they're at the head of the curve because this week they mentioned Tank Top TV! Seriously, though, you should check it out if you're into your tech and your TV.

Recommendations for everyone!

2010-01-29T10:45:00.000-08:00

We've enabled programme recommendations for all users.

Based on the programmes you mark as favourites, Tank Top TV can offer recommendations for other shows you might like to watch.

Sign in, take a look at your Dashboard and let us know what you think of the programmes suggested for you!

As you browse round the site you'll also see that we now show "more like this" for each programme - the other shows that are also watched by users who like that programme. For example, Tank Top TV users who like Top Gear also like these shows.

A first take on recommendations

2010-01-11T04:01:00.000-08:00

Beta users can now take an early look at online TV show recommendations from Tank Top TV! If you're a beta user, you'll find your recommendations in the dashboard.

The recommendations will get better as we get more data about what people watch, and what their favourite shows are, but for now we'd love to hear what you think of this first take on programme recommendations.

Get notified about your favourite programmes

2010-01-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

We've just moved email notifications out of Beta! Any user can now get a notification about new episodes of their favourite programmes when they are made available online.

If you're already a Tank Top TV user, you can turn this feature on in Your Account. If there are new episodes of any of your favourite programmes, you'll get an email overnight telling you about them (no email means no new episodes).

An extra Christmas present

2009-12-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

Tank Top has been a little neglected recently, you might think. That's not entirely true - what happened was, I rashly rushed into installing Snow Leopard, and that gave me a whole load of things that aren't compatible with the TurboGears environment we're using. It has been so frustrating to get it all working again, but some concerted effort this afternoon finally paid off.

Things we had to mess about with included

changing the default Python back to 2.5 instead of 2.6 (that was the easy bit!)
reinstalling TurboGears and some additional modules
rebuilding psycopg2, which required a reinstall of PostgreSQL to get hold of a 32-bit library, using gcc 4.0 instead of 4.2, modifying the psycopg2 build to pick up the right PostgreSQL version, and, for good measure, manually setting the architecture flags
about 48 different mistakes along the way.

It has been a real advert for open source distributions with a single community where you'd go look for answers, instead of finding conflicting advice on different blogs that may or may not be appropriate.

Anyway, it's finally all sorted out, and I'm considering that a Christmas bonus. What a way to spend Boxing Day!

Tweets for beta testers

2009-10-27T04:16:00.000-07:00

Beta testers - if you had trouble setting up Twitter you'll be glad to know we've resolved a problem there. Do let us know, as always, if it still doesn't work for you.

First updates in response to Beta

2009-10-20T07:06:00.001-07:00

Beta testers - thanks for all your comments so far! We've still got a lot to work on, but here are a couple of changes we've made in response to your feedback.

Don't want to Tweet every time you watch something, but still want to let your friends know what's cool? Now you can Tweet automatically when you mark a programme as a favourite. (You'll need to be signed up to the Tank Top Beta programme to do that.)

A new menu on the programme's page lets you mark all episodes as seen with one click.

As ever, let us know if you have any problems or comments.

We've also had some comments that it's confusing that programmes you haven't said you're watching appear in your programme list, and we're dreaming up a way to make this much clearer. Might take a bit of work, but we will get there.

On a separate note, seems like we're getting a lot of site timeouts again - I'm thinking we'll have to try moving the site to a different server. Apologies if you've been affected.

Twoot?

2009-10-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Added a feature to tweet programmes you watch to our Beta programme. Not sure I like it yet - needs some finer grain control about what you tweet and when. Perhaps we need something that tweets you're watching a documentary on BBC4 whenever you watch "Supersize versus superskinny"?

Join our beta testers!

2009-10-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Help us make Tank Top TV the best place to find online TV you want to watch! We're working on a whole bunch of features for Tank Top, and we'd like your views before we release them to the wild. If you'd like to get involved, here's where you sign up. Tell your friends too, while we've still got space in the beta program...

Tank Traps

2009-09-30T12:30:00.001-07:00

Just fixing some reasonably long standing problems parsing the 4oD feed, which unfortunately has meant a few programmes and episodes were missing from our listings. Should all be fixed in a moment.

We're also thinking about consolidating all the 4oD content as a single channel, as splitting it between Channel 4, E4 and More 4 seems to us to confuse more than it helps.

Confused?

2009-09-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

Now that we've got zillions of programmes in the database, we were well overdue a couple of changes that have just gone live:

Long lists of programmes are now paginated. This should speed things along some more, but we'll be keeping an eye on whether we continue to get so many timed out pages, and if we do we'll be looking for a different hosting solution. We're on a shared server and maybe that's just not good enough - we'll see.

Tank Top has been too confusing for new users, so now they'll get some guidance when they first sign up. We'd like to improve this process even further, but it's a start.

As always, your feedback's very welcome - are things better with these changes?

A need for speed

2009-09-02T09:41:00.001-07:00

Phil did some cool things to speed up Tank Top over the last couple of weeks, but we're still getting quite a few server timeouts. Apologies if you hit our new "unravelled" message - we're investigating what we can do to prevent this...

Nice new cardigan for Demand Five

2009-08-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-29T04:38:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T10:48:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-08-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T14:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

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?

Since we last talked...

2009-07-08T04:23:00.000-07:00

...we've tidied up a few things on Tank Top:

Channels are all in one list rather than separate blocked / unblocked lists
Category lists can all be accessed from one place, and you can see the full list of all categories as well as separate blocked / unblocked lists

We think this is a bit easier to find your way around - but let us know what you think!

We also pushed the boat out and bought some Tank Top TV minicards and stickers from the nice people at Moo - if you get in touch and say something nice we might even send you some!