Tank Top TV

New feature! Your watchlist

2012-01-10T09:40:00.000Z

Happy new year, Tank Top TVers!

When you sign in to Tank Top there's a new watchlist atop your dashboard, to help you keep track of the shows you're intending to view. New episodes of your favourite programmes automatically get added to the watchlist (and you can also add shows manually).

Where possible we now also track the expiry date for each episode, so you can see at a glance how long the shows you want to watch will be available.

We have also made some pretty significant changes to the site's performance, so we hope you'll find it's a lot more responsive.

Let's do this right!

2011-11-18T18:58:00.001Z

Tank Top TV first came about a couple of years ago, when Phil built himself a simple website that showed a list of all the programmes available on BBC iPlayer, except for anything he dismissed as not interesting. We've come quite a long way since that first text-based list of programmes.

After a year or so concentrating on other things, we're looking at Tank Top TV again with a fresh eye and a whole bunch of ideas for making it awesome. A lot of it's going to be rebuilt from scratch. Our users are going to see some big improvements, and the people who aren't our users yet are going to hear about it as the best discovery engine for online TV content!

We're looking for people to help - so if you're interested in online TV and want to help build Tank Top the way it should be, we'd love to hear from you.

Telecom Council Next Gen TV event

2011-05-05T19:48:00.000+01:00

Next week I'm moderating a panel on Customization, Discovery & Search at the Next Gen TV event run by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. If you'll be there and you've got specific questions you'd like the panel to answer, just get in touch!

Our other project

2011-03-03T19:51:00.000Z

OK, we'd admit it - things haven't been changing all that much on Tank Top TV for the last few months. The reason? We got involved in a project called Thrutu.

It's a mobile app (for Android to start with) that makes it really easy to share rich content with other people while you're talking on the phone. Check it out and let us know what you think!

And if you have things you'd really like us to sort out on Tank Top TV, then drop us a line to encourage us :-)

Expiry info for all channels!

2010-12-31T15:30:00.001Z

Tank Top TV now loads the expiry date for shows from all supported channels! So if you mark a show as a favourite, you can get a notification before it expires, whether it's on BBC iPlayer, 4oD, Demand Five or ITV Player.

Show expiry information

2010-12-17T17:54:00.000Z

Episodes - now showing expiry dates

We're starting to import information about when TV shows will expire - that is, when they will no longer be available to view online. At the moment we're importing this info for Channel 4 and Channel 5, but not for any other channels, but we hope to get to this soon.

From Your Account, you can now opt to have an email sent to let you know when one of your favourite shows is about to expire. No guarantees that we will always get this right (and it will only work for the channels where we've imported the expiry info), but hopefully it will help! Let us know if you have any problems.

Demand Five, and expiry dates

2010-11-16T17:40:00.000Z

Demand Five listings should now be working again. Let us know if you find programmes missing.

We're also gradually adding expiry dates to the episode listings, starting with Demand Five and 4oD (so far).

Channels

2010-10-31T16:33:00.001Z

There are a few more channels we could be adding: some require subscriptions (like Sky Player and Virgin Media Player), others are accessible from the US, like Hulu. What would you like to see?

Demand Five

2010-09-16T19:41:00.001+01:00

Yes, we are having problems with Demand Five at the moment. They have changed their feeds, and we need to do some work to catch up. Watch this space...

Programme popularity by page views

2010-09-14T06:48:00.000+01:00

We get lots of visitors to Tank Top TV who never actually watch a programme or favourite them. What programmes are they interested in? Find out with a new list on our Popular programmes page, showing which programmes are getting the most page views.

Lots of them look like guilty pleasures to me - explains why they aren't signing in...

We're also working on a "Velocity" view that shows the programmes currently getting the biggest rise in attention - should be out in a week or two.

TV films online

2010-07-26T13:28:00.000+01:00

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

2010-07-07T19:41:00.000+01:00

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

2010-06-28T09:56:00.000+01:00

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

2010-06-17T17:41:00.000+01:00

Checked out the awards yet?

2010-06-10T20:47:00.001+01:00

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!

2010-05-29T17:22:00.000+01:00

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

2010-05-20T14:39:00.000+01:00

Looks nice, eh?

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

Thrilling stuff

2010-05-05T14:18:00.000+01:00

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

Facebook Like buttons

2010-04-22T21:14:00.000+01:00

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?

2010-04-13T21:25:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-01T18:12:00.000+01:00

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

2010-03-22T18:27:00.000Z

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

2010-02-26T18:09:00.000Z

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

2010-02-17T15:14:00.000Z

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!

2010-02-02T10:03:00.000Z

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!

2010-01-29T18:45:00.000Z

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

2010-01-11T12:01:00.000Z

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

2010-01-06T20:37:00.000Z

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

2009-12-26T17:39:00.000Z

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

2009-10-27T11:16:00.000Z

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

2009-10-20T15:06:00.001+01:00

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?

2009-10-09T22:42:00.000+01:00

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!

2009-10-05T16:21:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-30T20:30:00.001+01:00

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?

2009-09-05T19:38:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-02T17:41:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-30T14:49:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-29T16:55:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-29T12:42:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-29T12:38:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-22T15:47:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-20T22:36:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-16T18:48:00.001+01:00

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?

2009-08-14T15:54:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-10T22:32:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-10T22:21:00.000+01:00

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...

2009-07-08T12:23:00.000+01:00

...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!

Anonymous users, new programmes this week

2009-06-23T15:58:00.000+01:00

New features deployed today!

Anonymous users can now browse the listings. If you aren't signed in and you try to block or favourite something, you'll be taken back to the login page.
For both signed in and anonymous users there's a list of new programmes from the last 7 days. This list won't be fully populated until it has been running for a week!

On the less positive front we are running out of memory at our hosting service, so if anyone has any bright ideas on how to reduce memory consumption in Turbogears, we're all ears...

Performance improvements

2009-06-14T11:13:00.000+01:00

Oops, I found a silly mistake in the code when you click on the 'block' cross or 'favourite' heart on the main programme list page. The good news is that it was easy to correct and now marking programs as favourites or blocking them is much much faster.

ITV now listed! And you can mark your favourites

2009-06-10T22:03:00.001+01:00

Phil's done magic things to get ITV Player shows included in our listings!

And my contribution to this release is a new Favourites list - you can mark shows as your favourites to add them to this list.

So that's two big new features we can tick off our to-do list...but somehow we've got even more we want to work on: getting the category information for ITV shows for one thing. And with all their shows as well as what's on BBC iPlayer, the programme list is very long now, so we're going to work on some ways to help you easily get it down to a manageable size of shows you really want to watch.

Let us know what you think!

Making the most of Tank Top TV

2009-06-10T16:29:00.000+01:00

The idea of Tank Top TV is to give you a manageably short list of programmes that you might want to watch online. When you first create an account, you'll find a long list of everything we currently know about that's available. To get the most out of the service, you'll want to block the things you never want to watch so that it's easier to find what you do like. Here are our hints and tips...

If you never watch programmes from a particular channel, block the whole channel. For example, Personally I don't get great performance from iPlayer HD, so I've blocked the BBC HD channel from my list.
You can block whole categories of programmes to remove things you never watch. Programmes are often assigned to multiple categories - we get this information straight from the broadcaster. A programme won't be listed on Tank Top if you've blocked any of its categories. So if you love cricket but you hate snooker, you'll want to block the Snooker category but not Sport.
Clicking on a category name in the category list shows you all its programmes, so that's an easy way to see what you're going to drop if you block that category.
Once you've filtered on channels and categories, block everything else from your programme list that you don't want cluttering up your screen next time you log in. If you don't think you'll watch it, you might was well block it. You can always check what you've blocked and unblock it if you change your mind!

Spend a few minutes filtering your list to start with, and you'll appreciate it when you next sign in and have sensible list of programmes to consider for your viewing pleasure!

What is Tank Top TV?

2009-06-04T10:28:00.001+01:00

Tank Top shows you a list of all the online TV shows that are currently available. You can filter out the programmes, channels and categories that you're not interested in, so you have a personalised list of what you might like to watch.

Here's an example programme list:

It's a lot quicker to find a programme to watch from this list than to navigate around BBC iPlayer searching for the things you might like. It's continually refreshed with the content that's available, so it's always up-to-date.

Right now we only cover BBC iPlayer, but we're working on adding listings for other sources too. The idea is to consolidate information about everything you might like to watch, all in one place.

Channel filtering

2009-06-04T10:19:00.000+01:00

You can now filter by channel as well as category. So if you never watch anything on BBC Four, or if you don't have the bandwidth for BBC HD, you can just remove those programmes from your list with a click of the mouse.

Blocking categories and programmes

2009-06-02T09:27:00.000+01:00

Phil added a link so you can block the category or programme you're looking at from within its own page rather than having to do it from the category / programme list. This does make Tank Top quite a bit easier to use.

And I've been writing a little bit of code (for the first time in years!) to add the ability to blocking and list by channel. We're being a bit cautious about deploying this feature as it's going to require a database change, and we don't want to break the live database - hopefully we will get the chance to test and roll out that update over the next few days.

Alpha alpha alpha!

2009-05-29T17:12:00.001+01:00

Here it is - our first live-to-the-public version of Tank Top TV.

Phil wrote what has become Tank Top, because he was fed up of searching all over BBC's iPlayer to see whether there are new versions of the programmes he wants to watch. We've used it for a while, and we think it's pretty cool, and we hope you will too.

Tank Top maintains a list of programmes that you're interested in. You can filter out programmes you're not interested in, so they won't appear on your list again. When there's a programme you want to watch, just click straight through to view it. You'll be taken direct to the right place on iPlayer - you'll still be watching the same content, in exactly the same way as usual. Tank Top just makes it easier to find.

New programmes that you haven't already blocked get added to your list automatically. If you don't like something, just block it so it won't appear again.

What next?

We've got loads of ideas for improvements and enhancements - here are just a few we're hoping to implement in the near future:

Adding more channels/providers like ITV Player, 4OD etc
Highlighting your favourite programmes - giving you the option of an email alert when there's a new episode available online
Filtering out entire channels
Recommending programmes you might like

What would you like to see? Let us know what you think!