Welcome to Couchville
March 6th, 2007 at 8:36 pm by Rakesh
Today, we’re officially launching the Couchville website. Couchville’s purpose is to be a simple TV listings website. In addition to being very usable and fast, there are a bunch of cool things about the site – one of them is the draggable program guide (kind of like Google Maps, but with your program guide) and easy to link to TV show pages for all of you bloggers (for example, a few of my favorite TV shows are Ugly Betty, How I Met Your Mother, (maybe I shouldn’t admit to this one…) Grey’s Anatomy, and, until last week’s episode, Lost).
Check out a few screenshots of Couchville:
Couchville’s draggable program guide
Simple search results
Couchville’s TV show pages are easy to link to
So head on over to Couchville and take the tour or just try the site out.
(other useful links: Press graphics and the FAQ)
Speaking about Couchville in the broader context of our company, SnapStream, Couchville represents a big step for us. We started this company 6 years ago and have spent most of our time focused on PC media center software. We’re best known for our Beyond TV product, a popular PC DVR among techies that does cool things like automatic commercial detection, compress TV shows to a bunch of different formats, stream TV around the home to other networked laptops and desktops, and advanced multi-tuner support. The only problem has been that the audience for PC DVR has been limited to early adopters willing to crack open their PCs and install a TV tuner card. So while we’ve built this really great, usable, simple TV experience, no one other than early adopters have been able to enjoy and appreciate it because of the work involved with setting it up (ie the work with installing a TV tuner card and then connecting your TV signal to your PC). That’s what brought us around to building Couchville. We wanted to build something that would be useful to almost anyone while applying the same usability principles and software development processes we used to build Beyond TV. And after looking at the other folks doing online TV guides, we decided Couchville would be a good place for us to go. We hope you enjoy it!
(and for all of our existing users that might wonder if this means we’re going to stop working on Beyond TV… two words: no way! PC DVR remains our focus and, who knows, at some point you might even see us try to blur the lines between Couchville and Beyond TV.)
March 7th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Couchville looks great…you mention “…try to blur the lines between Couchville and Beyond TV.”. How about trying to blur the lines between Beyond Media and Beyond TV…please…or at least come out and admit that it’s a dead product.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Wow. That’s a slick TV guide. I just replaced my Zap2It bookmark with Couchville.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
My encouragement on blurring the lines between Couchville and Beyond TV is – the faster the better! The program guide in Beyond TV is pretty good, but you have to stop watching something to use it. With a simple web interface in Couchville and one-click record options, that would be cool. I know you can do that in the web admin, but it’s not as easy as it could be. Also, in regards to both Couchville and the web admin of Beyond TV, an option to display more columns (hours) and rows (channels) would be nice.
March 11th, 2007 at 1:53 am
I’ll second the more columns comment above. At least get 6 in there to view a full 3 hour primetime block.
A way to fast forward quicker through the schedule would be nice too. Perhaps a button for Jump 12 (hours), Jump 24.
Great system though, Love my (4 tuners) SnapStream!
March 11th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
So, you didn’t like the Tricia Tanaca is Dead episode of Lost? I actually enjoyed it and I thought Hurley’s comment summed it up well — it was time to have some of fun. (I do have a soft spot for a VW micro-bus, so I may be biased)
March 12th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
How about add Brazil in the service?
March 19th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Please add the ability to see more than one lineup without changing the settings, like the built in BTV screen. It would allow those of us that have cable and a HD tuner for over the air to see all of what’s available.
March 20th, 2007 at 12:20 am
I love the site so far. It is the cleanest looking guide I have seen so far. Design alone will not separate you from the other dozen or so sites like this. The feature that all of us tv junkies need is a system by which to set up automatic reminders via email and moreover customizable rss feeds for every channel so that we can always know whats on. I dont even know if this is possible but I will help in the dev process any way i can.
-Champ
March 20th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
It would seem to me that creating a tv listing for the web would be a simple and straight-forward thing to do… But I have looked for years to finally discover Couchville!!! WTF!! IT’S ABOUT FREAKIN’ TIME!! Finally, FINALLY someone has actually used their minds and come up with the slickest, fastest, easiest guide I’ve ever found on the web! After searching for 8 years and using guides from TV Guide, Yahoo!, McVee, AOL, Google and untold others I have now found it!! As long as you keep this site running I’ll never go anywhere else. thank you, Thank You, Thank YOU!
March 21st, 2007 at 6:54 am
Again..great service! I would like to see the ability to log in to an account so I can see my preferences across different computers. Also, the ability to go back one week to see what was on at a particular time would be nice. I would also second the above comment to have automatic reminders and rss feeds.
Keep up the great work.
March 21st, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I agree with Keith, it’s too bad you have to exit a show you’re watching to look at the guide. Unless you were already recording it, you lose the ability to go back. I’ll try leaving Couchville.com running on the task bar, but I would like to see a button in BeyondTV that brings up a guide while the program is showing.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:05 am
I’ll second the need of “blurring” the lines between Beyondtv and Beyond Media, or just plain telling us you aren’t going to do diddly crap about integrating the two! This has gone on for long enough, get off the pot already and bring something to the table that is wanted and needed, as oposed to something like this which has the market saturated already! I’ll stick with a company that knows what they are doing, and for quite some time….ZAP2it! You aren’t bringing anything exciting to the table here folks! Old news, been there, done that! Get off your arse and bring to the table wha the users (US) have begged, pleaded, etc., and tell us what the heck you are going to do about it! This is getting so darn old now! You get some wild crazy idea after getting drunk on tea and say “Hey, we need another guide to saturate the market”, the users say “Hey, integrate BTV and BM in a professional way so Snapstream won’t go out of business”. Get a clue SNAPSTREAM! This is such a lame waste of resources, completely lame!!
March 24th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Don, this feature is already available in BTV. It doesn’t use the Couchville site, but if you press the “A” button on the firefly remote, you’ll get the snapstream guide right inside BTV. I’m sure there is a similar command for other remotes/the keyboard. Check around the support site.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
As long as folks are bringin it up – I have to add my 2-cents. I AGREE. get rid of the separation between beyond Media and Beyond TV. Also- adding a better guide like Couchville would be a welcome addition.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
When dragging, the channel lineup should wrap around. I should be able to go from channel 2 to 99 by dragging down.
Thanks
May 1st, 2007 at 12:32 am
Hi there – I’ve been using your service (Couchville) since a few days after you launched. I can’t tell you enough what a great job you’ve done.
If I can offer a feature request – the ability to quickly add a show to (for example) Google Calendar. I know I know.. TV shows on your calendar, get a life. But it would make great reminder system via Google Notifier. Regardless, thanks again!
Ross
July 10th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
love couchville–but what happened to favorites? I can add them but the button at the top to go to favorites is now gone…are you working on something–?
September 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am
I live at 59102 with antenna only and recently purchased a new digital TV. When I changed my settings to antenna digital I lost the PBS schedule although I still have it on channel 20 (KUSM 9). It is broadcast in digital here. How can I get it on my schedule without changing the settings back to analog just to get this one channel?
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Please integrate Couchville into BTV. That program guide is more accurate than Snapstream.net.
Thanks
December 13th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Couchville is the best reposter of television show listings. By far, you are superior to TV Guide, the supposed defacto standard! Couchville has typically had channels and channel listing available in advance of the actual availability of the cable channels themselves! I only wish my plasma came equipped with Couchville rather than TV Guide!
I only have a single issue currently, Discovery has renamed their HD channel to HD Theater and now made available the standard Discovery channel in HD (in my area – zip 73069). With this, Discovery in HD is not one of the listed HD channels in the Couchville listing (735). This is a small issue, contrary to the missing 13 out of 18 HD channels TV Guide is listing!
Keep up the great work! And start working on replacing TV Guide!
dm