70 years ago this month the first issue of the TV Guide was published with a picture of Disiderio Alberto Arnaz IV on the cover (Lucile Ball’s baby).
We would be tempted to think about how easy it must have been in the 50’s to publish a list of everything on TV, but in fact it was never easy. Even with only a handful of TV networks, local stations had control of their own programming making it difficult to assemble the data and even harder to display it. Viewers in Spokane did not care what was on in Syracuse. Despite the difficulty, the weekly printed TV Guide grew to be one of the most read magazines in the US ultimately peaking at 140 localized editions and 20 million readers.
Then came cable, then came satellite, then came the internet. For a short time when each household received everything for its TV through a single wire, the providers (either cable or satellite) knew what was available to just that one household and could produce an electronic guide. That is right, the guide button on the remote did at one time show everything available all in one place. In the TV business, that guide is called the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). In some cases that guide offers interactive features like customizing the listings or scheduling a recording. In that case it can be called the Interactive Program Guide (IPG).
The online version of the TV Guide, tvguide.com, is trying to offer one place where each household can see what could be seen on their TV. Building a usable consolidated EPG may not be possible. To illustrate the level of difficulty, let’s try to use it.
Query 1: “CSI” produces 3,088 results. 10 per page for 309 pages of listings
Query 2: “MOB TV” (see Friday’s post) produces nothing.
To see what is on right now, the viewer enters their timezone, picks live or streaming, then picks a provider… all of which is necessary to narrow the search enough to get a list short enough to display. Presumably there is a database at TV Guide that could be the most comprehensive in existence, but there is not a way to easily use that data.
Fandom.com bought TV Guide in October ‘22. Fandom.com is still running TVguide.com, likely to experiment with ways to make a useful online EPG. But they are also building Fandom.com to be the one place people go to discover content of any type.
Fandom.com calls themselves “the world’s largest fan wiki platform”. And anyone on the site can create their own special interest wiki – where the content they like can be curated. There are 385,000 wikis and over 50 million pages on Fandom.com. Fandom.com collects data on the 350 million people that visit their site every month and call that data “FanDNA”.
Fandom CMO, Stephanie Fried says: "FanDNA is the richest dataset on what people love in Movies, TV, Gaming, and Anime anywhere in the world. And we're able to pull out and uncover insights, not just about what people are watching, but why they're watching what they're watching, and how all of those pieces connect with each other."
This is a tall order, and they have a long way to go. When searching for “Mob TV” on Fandom.com the top result is “Everything coming to Netflix in May” published in April of 2018.
Let’s hope somebody points one of the new AI giant computers at this problem so we can all be saved from searching and searching and searching for what to watch tonight.
Links and Resources
TVguide.com:
https://www.tvguide.com/
Fandom.com:
https://www.fandom.com/
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