When Is That Show On?
I’m not a big TV watcher. Most shows: I could care less. I did get into Heroes last season and am looking forward to this upcoming season.
Meanwhile, since we moved into this new place with a different channel lineup for the cheapest cable they offer, my son has discovered the show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. He loves it.
That’s why I picked this particular show to demonstrate a new service I was let in on: LocateTV. It’s in private beta at the moment, thus why I had to be let in. The idea is: you want to find out when and where in the world you might be able to watch your favorite program.
I typed in Dirty Jobs into the LocateTV search engine and got a list of when shows were going to be on and what episodes they were going to show. You can also “embed” when the next show is going to be on, like I’ve done here. Or even when a particular episode is going to be on.
Part of the service uses your IP address to determine what time and station it should list. For example, when I searched on Heroes, it presented me a list telling me each show was on KING, the local NBC affiliate. It also knows I’m in the US. You can manually change the settings if you prefer, or it auto-detects improperly. It detected almost correctly for me. 
The site will also list DVD availability as well as webcast availability for any given show. The “WebTV” stuff isn’t entirely complete, or at least it didn’t list anything WebTV-related for Desperate Housewives when I know you can go to abc.com and watch it.
The biggest thing I could see them adding? RSS Feeds. I’d love to see an RSS Feed of my favorite shows. That way, I could track when a show is coming on without having to visit the site.
The other, burning question I have is: where’s the money? As in, how will the site make money? It’s a great idea, but if it doesn’t get bought by someone or doesn’t have a sustainable revenue stream, the site’s just going to die on the vine.
In any case, I will be keeping an eye on LocateTV, especially when the fall TV season starts.
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Comment by Lottie B
Hi Dameon, I’m from LocateTV blog - great to see you enjoy the site. To answer some of your queries: yes the online content is pretty restricted at the moment but growing rapidly - we haver collaborations in the pipeline with nearly all of the major providers but it takes a surprising amount of time to get access to their data in any ordered way… so bear with us! RSS feeds are on the roadmap once we have the basic search function as flawless, quick and rich as possible… as is a feature letting you know which new series are starting each week, which should really help you come fall. As regards money… don’t worry, we’re not planning on disappearing! Future revenue will be from affiliate partnerships, tied advertising and maybe text alerts - and for the moment we have investment happy that this will support LocateTV in the future so don’t fret. Although of course if anyone wants to buy us a beer anytime, well, every little helps…
Keep the feedback coming and if any of your worshipful readers would like private beta access get in touch and I might be able to sort something out.
Cheers - Lottie
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