SnapStream Blog

DownloadSquad posts on using Couchville with the Nintendo Wii:

There have been a number of things you can do with the Wii browser (tabbed browsing, watch videos) and here’s another one to add to the list: TV listings. Sure it seems like a simple enough idea, but the trick is having a TV listing web site that is simple, easy to search, and is legible on a TV itself: enter Couchville.

I still don’t have a Wii (when are these things going to be generally available!?), but when I get one I’m definitely going to try this out.

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.)

Many of you browsing the SnapStream website have come across a new project of ours called Couchville. It’s a simple website for TV listings. A formal announcement will come later this week, but meanwhile, head on over and check it out.