Sunday, December 04, 2005

No need for a tv guide anymore

Finally! I came across a website with a good online tv guide. There are a few tv guides on the internet for The Netherlands for a long time now, but I could not find one that's user friendly and easy to use. Now I found it on the most obvious place: on the website of the public broadcast organization: gids.omroep.nl.

I've never seen this function on that website before, although I have visited it from time to time. Omroep.nl is at least certainly not promoting that tv guide function.

Although I like that online tv guide, I think it still misses some essential features.

  • You have to view it on a browser.
    "Duh!" you would think, but the internet is more than what you see in your browser. There is more than one way to publish information. If that tv guide had a syndication functionality based on XML/RSS, I could load today's potentially interesting programs into my pocket computer, thus reading the tv guide everywhere I want.
  • The website does not remember some choices.
    Every time I visit the page I see the default tv guide. That's OK for your first visit ever, but I configured a filter for that tv guide on that site, so I have to switch every time manually to the filtered tv guide.
  • No special functionality
    The online tv guide is simple and works like a charm, but it's simplicity is also a problem. The site could do so much more than it is capable now. That's a pity, because the online guide can be potentially so much better than a paper one, when the developers make extensive use of cross-references, user profiles, filtering (like searching for different keywords), syndication and so forth.

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