Tank Top TV

TV films online

2010-07-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

You can now see at a glance what films are available to view online from BBC iPlayer and Channel 4.

We don't get categories - including whether a programme is actually a film - from ITV Player or Demand Five as they don't supply that information. But if they do, we'll include their films in our listing.

Sharing your TV shows with your friends

2010-07-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

Now you can link your account with Twitter or Facebook, and let your friends know what programmes you're watching or marking as favourites - and the awards you've earned on Tank Top TV.

New survey

2010-06-28T01:56:00.000-07:00

If you've got 5 minutes to spare, help us make Tank Top TV a better service for finding your TV online, by completing our new survey - thanks!

How to find episodes of your favourite TV shows online

2010-06-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

Checked out the awards yet?

2010-06-10T12:47:00.001-07:00

If you're a beta tester you can get more detail about how to earn Tank Top TV Awards here.

Beta testers - start collecting awards!

2010-05-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

Like collecting badges on FourSquare? Now you can get the same sense of satisfaction without bothering to go out. We've started adding collectable awards to Tank Top - for now, only beta testers can access them while we iron out any issues.

To start with, you can gain awards like Newbie just for marking five shows as favourites, or Advocate for sending five programme recommendations to your friends. Fanboy requires you to be a fairly dedicated viewer of a long-running series. There are a few more surprises to discover too.

At this first stage you might find you need to refresh your dashboard to see new awards you've qualified for.

Let us know your ideas for new awards as we'll be adding more for you to collect.

Tank Top on an iPad

2010-05-20T06:39:00.000-07:00

Looks nice, eh?

Unfortunately what with Apple not supporting Flash on iPads and iPhones, you can't actually watch the content. (Yet?)

Thrilling stuff

2010-05-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

We were literally Thrilled yesterday - Tank Top TV was featured in London Thrillist.

Facebook Like buttons

2010-04-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Since Facebook have made it so easy, we've added 'Like' buttons onto the programme pages so you can very easily share with your friends what programmes you like.

Is this a good thing? Let us know what you think.

APIs - would you like some?

2010-04-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of folks have suggested that we should support APIs on Tank Top TV, and that's definitely something we've been thinking might be nice. What do you think?

We'd love to hear what data you'd like to be able to get from Tank Top via API or RSS feed. And would you use it?

Let us know your thoughts either by commenting here on this blog, by email or on Twitter.

What's hot and what's not

2010-04-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

For a while now we've been showing what are the most popular online TV shows with Tank Top users, but have you ever been curious to know what's least popular? If you're a Tank Top beta user, now you can find out - take a look at our list of the most unpopular TV programmes & categories.

Creating accounts with social networks

2010-03-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

It's even easier for new users to create and sign in to their accounts on Tank Top TV now. We've incorporated a social network connection feature (we're using one from Gigya) which you'll see on our Log in page.

We plan to add the ability to connect an existing account too, but please bear with us while we get that up and running.

Beta users can currently automatically Tweet the programmes they favourite and watch. For now, unfortunately, you need to sign in to Twitter separately for that. It's clunky, but it's just temporary, and hopefully you beta users are a tolerant lot....

Down the line we'll be using these social features to make it much easier to share the online TV programmes you enjoy.

Update as regular users might have seen, we've had a bunch of issues the last few days, and as part of trying to track that down we've backed out the social network connection change for now

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?