Back on December 12, I wrote a blog about the demise of the Yahoo TV Guide Website. Demise may be the wrong word here as the site still exists...but it is completely worthless, slow loading, and impossible to use. Here is a quick background in case you missed the previous blog:
Back in late November, Yahoo changed their very good TV listing website to a new beta version...no warning, no ability to see the old site while the new one was in beta, and no easy way to write one's displeasure with the new system. As I write this in February, not much has changed. It is still worthless and unusable.
Since my Dec 12 story, I did find a place on Yahoo's enormous Website where people can register their complaints...and boy, have they been doing just that. If you go to the site, you'll find e-mail that borders on hate mail. You just don't mess around with people's TV habits and get away with it. Actually, its been fun to read people's complaints about the new guide as most of them mirror my own thinking...and we all know how wonderful it is to have people agree with you.
Now, I hate to make such a big deal about a TV guide, but its somewhat important to me as I have Direct TV...and with 250 channels to choose from, its nice to be able to see what's on at a glance without having to run through the cumbersome guide on the TV itself. That's why I relied on Yahoo for so long. I could easily see what's on all of my stations and also see what might be on one specific station. For instance, I could click on Turner Classic Movies and see what movies they were showing for a 24 hour period...then click on one movie title and see what it was about.
Anyway, Yahoo's new site forced me to find a new TV listing Website. After, some searching, I found the AOL TV guide website. And I have been mostly happy with it. I say mostly because there are a few features I don't like...the main one being the difficulty to get back to the main page after clicking on something to get specific information. It also would not remember my personal customizations of their listing guide page each time I checked back in. But, overall it was the best site I had found up to that point.
Recently, I checked back in at Yahoo's TV listing to see if it had changed. It was still unusable. I then checked in at the Yahoo complaint center to read what people were saying lately. Nothing had changed their either...lots more complaints than the last time I checked. But I did find that some of the complaints mentioned they had switched over to TitanTV for their listings.
I decided to give it a try. Wow...was I immediately impressed. Their listings were thorough and beautifully color coded. It was easy to move around and get the information I wanted. But the one thing I noticed immediately was that I couldn't get the Turner Classic Movies listing to show me just their listings for 24 hours.
One writer to the Yahoo TV hate mail page mentioned that you can really do some fantastic customizations to your TitanTV listing page...but I found out that in order to do that, one had to join. Now I hate joining almost everything, but I decided to give it a try. Joining was free and after a thorough reading of their terms and conditions and privacy policy, I decided that it was safe.
Joining made an immediate difference. I could check in at Turner Classic Movies (and, for that matter, any other channel) and see their movie listings. I then set up my own preferences for stations to show, leaving out a whole slew of channels that I never watch. It remembered me and my preferences when I went offline, then back to the web site.
TitanTV has several other great features such as searching for your favorite shows or actors, setting reminders, e-mailing reminders, installing reminders in your calendar program(using Ical), and filtering. If you are using a TV Tuner Video Card in your computer and are connected to your computer via a cable, you can click on a listing and have your computer to record the program.
This is a good site, even if you don't use all of TitanTV's option. Check it out.
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