mightyv

Film Four goes freeview

2006-07-24T08:36:00.000+01:00

Just incase you missed it, Film Four is now available to everyone on Freeview, as usual you can add this channel to your personal list on Mightyv.

Find your pies!

2006-05-01T13:36:00.000+01:00

I know, I know, you have a desperate need to record all television programmes which include pies. Me too. Up until now, mightyv would only search the programme titles. However, I've just added a new feature just for you pie-, Vegas- and bed-lovers - full text searching of programme descriptions. I'm just trying to make it easier to find interesting programmes.

Leon

(lovely pie photo from aricee)

Does time go across or down?

2006-04-24T17:31:00.000+01:00

Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog recently mentioned mightyv. They minimally comment "Calendar with Horizontal Hours", by which I understand that they reckon that hours should go across in the mightyv day view. An awful many television calendars go the other way, take the Radio Times for example, but I think it looks quite bad. The main reason I decided to make time go down is that you get to see the full program title, and program titles tend to get quite long. I get very annoyed with websites like the Radio Times' which show "World Snooke..." as a program. This is the web, we don't need to abbreviate. Thus I decided that time should progress down the page, much like your real diary does (and people seem to back me up). Comments welcome.

Leon

Statistics galore

2006-03-16T21:15:00.000Z

In a few weeks I'll be presenting a talk about mighTyV at YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo, which should be fun. I've been updating one slide at the end of the talk where we have various statistics about mightyv, and I noticed that we have 1,130 registered users. This begs the question of who was user 1,000? Well done ema! (Poor ema, she has no friends).

I was also suprised that around 100 people are using the iCal feeds. I expected RSS to be much more popular, but it's only twice as popular with 230 people subscribed to them.

Very few people have chosen a user picture. Shame on you, go and add one now.

We've reached 1,000 tags and 300,000 program events, phew.

Be sure to schedule and watch Planet Earth this weekend - the BBC does what it does best, with an absolutely beautiful nature series.

Leon

Design tweaking

2006-02-22T11:23:00.000Z

I liked the original design for mightyv, but I did feel that the navigation was a little confusing and that it was wasting a lot of screen estate. This week, I've been tweaking the design of the site. I've introduced new menu bars to try to simplify navigation and we have a brand new logo designed by Matthew Gilbert (Chimpfactory). It's a superhero with an orange cape and a television for a head (mightyv, geddit?):

The navigation is currently a little rough, but don't worry, there's more tweaking ahead. Enjoy!

Leon

New ITV logos

2006-02-20T13:55:00.000Z

I know I'm behind the times, but I've only just noticed the new ITV logos. They look quite nice alone, but they really come into their own when put together:

See what I mean? Hmm, what a weird four. Anway, the new logos are on mightyv...

Leon

RSS now works with 30boxes.com

2006-02-19T12:07:00.000Z

Thanks to Stephen Burch for pointing out that our RSS was a little lame - we've fixed this; it now works with http://30boxes.com/ - which was Stephens issue.

It is a shame that 30boxes doesn't yet support iCal imports as that would make more sense than using RSS, maybe it will one day.

Leo

More and more features...

2006-02-18T11:20:00.000Z

The schedule system has been overhauled - there's still a few bits we're not happy with but overall it should be behaving itself a lot better - it will now no longer add programs to your schedule which you have had on there previously.

New logos for all the ITV stuff

Lots of database cleanup stuff - but you don't care about that.

Page for the most rated series (on the channels you watch)

Page for more recent comments

Lots of cleaning up on the day view - so there are now up and down arrows around the time so you can move to the next morning or previous evening, we also show programs which started before today but end today.

There's a feedback form you can now use

The recommendation system is back again - it's purely on tags at the moment, but we'll look at including ratings at a later stage.

You can now recommend a program or series to a friend

We've also made it so you can add links to external sites - such as Wikipedia or the home page of a program

Enjoy!

Life on Mars / FilmFour

2006-02-09T09:31:00.000Z

One of my favourite TV shows this year has been Life on Mars. No, it's not sci-fi, but it is about a detective travelling back in time to Manchester 1973 after he is run over by car. Fast cars, cool music and witty one-liners make this rock, and you're always left guessing as to whever he has gone back in time, or if he's in a coma.

In other news, looks like Freeview will gain some more films as FilmFour will drop its subscription and move to Freeview. Where will I find the time to watch all these new films?

Leon

More features!

2006-01-29T12:28:00.000Z

We've been working hard and have just put live...

Comments: leave comments about a series - rate other people's comments

Friends: not only can you see what they are watching on the channels you watch, but also on all channels, or even what they were watching last week.

There's a 'forgot' password form.

A massive underlying change in the login and database code as well as how the database is strctured - but you don't need to worry about that - it just works.

We also added Amazon links to DVD's for films.

We've always been beta, but now we are officially Beta - it's next to the logo - so we must be.

We've written our own code to identify what is a film, so there are about 30% more films on the Films This Week link - there may be the odd thing we mark as a film which isn't, but we thought it was better to go that way than the other.

Oh yea, you also get to see the next 10 things your friends are watching on the home page.

Phew, I think that's about it - enjoy

Leo

Friends!

2006-01-22T10:21:00.000Z

If you sign in you can now search for your other friends who use MighTyV - because of course you have told everyone about it - haven't you?

Add these wonderful friends to your list and then see what they are watching - so you never get that "Did you see X last night?" question where you have to say "I would have but I didn't know it was on" - because now you'll know what they were watching too.

Enjoy

Leo

Running on new server and changes...

2005-12-18T19:44:00.000Z

We have now switched over to running on the new (much faster) server.

I have also made quite a few changes...

1) Removed BBC specific searches (we want to offer all functionality on all channels and we can't get the same amount of data for any other channels)

2) Add tag search with auto complete to main search form

3) Alter the mightyv_eyetv.pl script, now deletes future events before each import, so if you delete something from your schedule it will not get recorded, also automatically looks up channel id (you need the new Mac::EyeTV 0.30 version.

4) Added 'Sky Three' channel and icon (thanks to Rich for the icon) - this will be live tomorrow.

5) Applied large doc patch from paulm

6) Minor bug fix

Enjoy

Leo

Speed of new server..

2005-12-17T08:57:00.000Z

So, Leon wanted some figures on how much faster the new server (given to us by the BBC) was compared to the hardware we had been running it on... before we made the switch over.

OLD:
ab -n 100 -c 3 'http://www.mightyv.com/search?pre=whats_on_now&service_type=tv'
Time taken for tests: 48.602704 seconds
Requests per second: 2.06 [#/sec] (mean)
100% 9114 (longest request - ms)

NEW:
ab -n 100 -c 3 'http://new.mightyv.com/search?pre=whats_on_now&service_type=tv'
Time taken for tests: 2.982551 seconds
Requests per second: 33.53 [#/sec] (mean)
100% 245 (longest request - ms)

Something a bit more complex:
OLD - NOTICE THIS IS 10/2, not 100/3 - I gave up on 100/3 after 10 mins!:
ab -n 10 -c 2 'http://www.mightyv.com/feed/schedule//json'
Time taken for tests: 66.423677 seconds
Requests per second: 0.15 [#/sec] (mean)
100% 26483 (longest request)

NEW:
ab -n 100 -c 3 'http://new.mightyv.com/feed/schedule//json'
Time taken for tests: 65.819925 seconds
Requests per second: 1.52 [#/sec] (mean)
100% 2016 (longest request - ms)

General conclusion... new server... to coin a phrase... "Kicks ass",
now to actually switch over to using it!

Leo

Backstage meetup

2005-12-14T16:27:00.000Z

On Monday we visited the BBC to talk about mightyv and then attended the backstage.bbc.co.uk meet-up. It was wonderful to chat to Ben and everyone about mashing up more data. Check out the photos!

Leon

Improve mightyv!

2005-11-28T20:11:00.000Z

Want to help us improve mightyv?

Email info at mightyv.com - or use the feedback form on the site.

We also started an IRC channel: irc.perl.org #mightyv

Come have a chat!

Leon

London Perl Workshop

2005-11-27T12:14:00.000Z

The talk at LPW went really well, lots of people seemed interested in how we developed MighTyV.

Slides are available in PDF format.

Leo

Backstage prize

2005-11-24T11:40:00.000Z

The prize for winning the Backstage competition was "geek bling". We've now received the prize: A Dell SC1425 server. We're going to add some more storage, put it in colocation this weekend and then move mighTyV to it. Sweet!

Small plug: We're giving a talk about mighTyV on Saturday at the London Perl Workshop. See you there!

Leon

Highlighting scheduled programs & ITV 4

2005-11-09T09:37:00.000Z

I always found it a little hard to figure out what programs I was recording and whether adding another program would create a clash. I've now added a new feature to MighTyV which shows you which programs are scheduled by giving them a red highlight. This makes it easy to decide what else to schedule:

We've also added ITV 4 to MighTyV. To add it to your lineup, go to "Your account", then "Do you want to change your channels?" and drag the ITV 4 logo (it's dark green) from the right to the left. Now you can enjoy the new channel, including Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Leon

Changes..

2005-11-06T12:13:00.000Z

I've just put live a lot of internal changes. You should see very little different on the user interface, but the data should be a lot cleaner and smarter (there were quite a few problems with series relating to programs on the wrong channel).

We've still got a few issues which we need to resolve, but we'll get there.

Leo

We won!

2005-10-26T21:16:00.000+01:00

From the BBC Backstage blog:

"We all loved this.
It’s a fantastically impressive prototype with a wealth of features and innovative ideas already implemented that we were almost overwhelmed. That said the simplicity of the user experience meant that it was easy to use out of the box. There is a lot of different findability here; tagging, ratings, recommendations as well as the basic grid format with innovative and different ways of navigating your way through thousands of hours of TV and radio.

There was a real effort to integrate non BBC feeds (imdb, bleb) and the TV Anytime metadata was neatly exploited via the accessibility search tool as well as genre lists such as films and comedy. I haven't mentioned the personalisation (but you can sign up for your preferred channels) and some real heavy lifting behind the scenes plumbing like an open source Perl TV::Anytime parser which the team have made available to CPAN. We were itching to use this and show it around as soon as it was submitted which is a sure sign that Leo and Leon had come up with something special...

This is fantastic stuff which thoroughly deserves to win the first Backstage competition."

Now to think about that long list of TODO items we still have!

More 4

2005-10-13T09:56:00.000+01:00

We've only just gone live, and what do Channel 4 go and do? Start broadcasting a new channel: More 4. We've now added it to MighTyV. To add it to your lineup, go to "Your account", then "Do you want to change your channels?" and drag the More 4 logo (it's dark green) from the right to the left. Now you can enjoy the new channel, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

Leon

Backstage Competition Closed

2005-10-04T12:27:00.000+01:00

As many of you know, we created mighTyV not only because it's cool and useful for finding new TV programs to watch, but also as an entry into the BBC Backstage competition, which has now closed. This is the nail-biting time where we wonder which of the entrants will win. Wish us luck!

Leon

Changes

2005-09-29T15:36:00.000+01:00

There have been many changes to http://www.mightyv.com/ over the last few days. Thanks to everyone who has helped test it and entered tags - tags are good!

So what's changed?

Big changes:

The daily view now defaults to just showing programs after 6pm, you can still view what's on earlier if you like

The recommendation system now looks at tags as well as BBC genres - yes it's slow at the moment

You can now not only select which channels you want, but also order how they are displayed

Smaller changes:

Finally have images for all channels - still need to clean them up at some point

We added a snippet of the description for each channel in lots of places

Tags can be added to a series on the series page as well as the program page

You can now delete tags you added

Ickle changes:

We added a smaller film icon so we could put it in more places

Many little changes!

Enjoy!

Leo

Greetings

2005-09-27T13:40:00.000+01:00

Hi there, I've been interested in TV schedules for a while: I've had a TiVo for years now (and so have my sister and parents) and have an EyeTV 400 hooked up to my Mac mini to record Freeview (digital terrestrial television). When the BBC announced their Backstage competition I considered it a great excuse to build what I've always wanted. So check out MighTyV and tell us what you think.

My favourite series is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. I prefer the original series, although CSI: Miami and CSI: NY are good too...

Leon

MighTyV in Beta

2005-09-27T13:18:00.000+01:00

MighTyV is now in Beta, this means we hope that no user information will have to be deleted - but we stilll can not guarantee it!

If you don't know what MighTyV is; check out the about page.

Please post comments to this blog of any issues you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them.

Leo