[opendtv] EE Times: Oh No! What Now?

From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 21:41:06 +0000
Hey Craig. No MVPD subscription required!

Bert

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http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36

Oh No! What Now?
Max Maxfield, Designline Editor
7/17/2013 04:56 PM EDT

Have you ever got to the end of a television season you are really enjoying and 
thought to yourself "Oh no! What now?"?

I have several friends who never watch broadcast television. Some of them use a 
television set to show DVDs -- but some don't own a television set at all. By 
comparison, we (my wife, son, and I) have a television set in just about every 
room in the house.

I'm not particularly proud of this, you understand -- that's just the way 
things are. The bottom line is that I love doing a lot of things, including 
reading books, creating weird and wonderful electronic projects, working with 
ceramics, and playing with my kiln. But I have to admit that I also spend a lot 
of time watching television.

My current favorite programs include Doctor Who, The Big Bang Theory, Storage 
Wars, Pawn Stars, Masterpiece Theater, and the Antiques Roadshow, to name but a 
few.

So, as I mentioned earlier, what happens when you reach the end of a current 
season? It could be six months, nine months, or even longer before the next 
season starts. What are you going to do until then? Household chores? Ugh!

Well, I just heard from my chum Jude Fiorillo, who obviously watches too much 
television himself. As you may recall, Jude and his friends are the little 
scamps behind CPUBoss.com, GPUBoss.com, SSDBoss.com, and PhoneRocket.com, so I 
have no idea how they find any time to watch television in the first place.

Jude tells me that he and his "gang" have been slogging away, creating a new 
website called Televisor.com. It seems that their systems collects millions of 
user-submitted TV ratings from sites around the web in order to harness the 
wisdom of crowds and analyze what shows have fans in common. All you have to do 
is to enter the name of one of your favorite shows in the "Find me a show to 
watch like..." field as illustrated below:

[Graphic of Televisor search UI]

Their system then personalizes a list of TV recommendations for other shows it 
thinks you will like, together with trailers, IMDB info, and streaming sources, 
all in one place. The system further interprets and adapts its recommendations 
to your likes and dislikes as you interact with the site.

I couldn't help myself, I immediately bounced over to Televisor.com and entered 
Babylon 5 just to see what would happen. The results were pretty impressive, 
involving a mix of some of my favorite science fiction series along with some 
I'd never even heard of before -- a few of which looked very interesting indeed.

Then I started venturing further afield. In some cases, I wasn't too sure of 
the system's recommendations, but the great thing is that you can use the 
"Thumbs-Up" and "Thumbs-Down" icons associated with each offering to say 
whether you like it or not, and the system uses this to personalize your 
results. I'm assuming that it gets better and better over time the more you 
interact with it.

The only problem is that this is somewhat addictive, because you keep on 
discovering more and more programs with which you are unfamiliar, but about 
which you want to learn more. Speaking of which, I just ran across a series 
called Angel from 1999 that I never saw, but the trailer looks brilliant -- I'm 
going to download the pilot to my iPad this evening and check it out!

Is it just that I'm easily led? What about you? Why don't you take a look at 
Televisor.com and poke around for a couple of minutes and then post a comment 
below to let the rest of us know what you think.

 
 
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[opendtv] EE Times: Oh No! What Now?

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