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Television Media

A New Replacement for TV Tome 196

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the community-collaboration-at-its-best dept.
Randall311 writes to tell us about, what the creators hope will be, a new replacement for the old TV Tome website, the TV IV Wiki. The once popular TV Tome website was absorbed by CNET in April of this year and most of the content was added to their TV.com website. Many users dislike the new format with vast amounts of flash, obnoxious ads, and missing content. So, if you liked the old TV Tome website perhaps this will allow the community to rebuild what it has lost.
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A New Replacement for TV Tome More

A New Replacement for TV Tome

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  • Poor resource (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 )
    There are only 116 programs listed in the tviv database. Contrast this with 3500 programs in the TV Tome website.

    The only appeal that this may have is that it is a wiki so users can update as they see fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get what you pay for.
    • As TFA mentions, its a _new_ replacement. Thanks to the wiki approach, it should be able to reach the popularity and coverage that the original TV Tome once had.

    • Re:Poor resource (Score:5, Insightful)

      by /ASCII ( 86998 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:27AM (#13545157) Homepage
      TV Tome didn't always have thousands of programs, hopefully tviv will start catching up quickly. This is a bit like what happened with CDDB and FreeDB. Sure CDDB was a much better source for a while, but FreeDB quickly caught on and is new a perfectly viable source of CD information.

      And since both sites are free, your comment about getting what you pay for makes no sense whatsoever.
      • I remember when it was free, and I was adding content to it. then it went private, and I was annoyed they made money off my time and effort. Then IMDB started up, and I thought, surely they won't do the same thing... but they did.

        I know, fool me twice, shame on me. So I haven't helped with Wikipedia or TVTome :)

        • Re:Funny you should mention CDDB (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I know, fool me twice, shame on me. So I haven't helped with Wikipedia or TVTome :)
          TVTome I can understand, but Wikipedia? They can't cut you off from the data you submit, even if they wanted to. If Wikipedia went pay tomorrow, the content is still free because of the license, unlke CCDB/IMDB/TVTome.
        • IMDB does make most of their data available for download, [imdb.com] though. With some time, you could slice that up and put it into your own local database and query it however you wanted.

    • Re:Poor resource (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tabkey12 ( 851759 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:28AM (#13545163) Homepage
      The only appeal that this may have is that it is a wiki so users can update as they see fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get what you pay for.

      TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki. It's the advertising and interface that sucks...

      • Re:Poor resource (Score:2, Interesting)

        by rudy_wayne ( 414635 )
        "TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki."

        Not entirely true. All editing has to be approved by moderators who seem to reject everything. I've submitted numerous things to correct articles that are poorly written and/or just plain wrong, and they've all been rejected.

    • Its because its new ?

      "what the creators hope will be a new replacement for the old TV Tome website"

      give it a chance before you right it off so easily !
    • And since you don't pay for TV Tome...

  • Mirroring TV.com? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rteunissen ( 740645 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:17AM (#13545124)
    What would be the legal status of mirroring most of the tv.com content to the new wiki? Considering that the content on tvtome.com was submitted by people from all over the world, could a former tvtome editor place his own text (now part of tv.com) on the wiki? Or can we just outright copy everything over and get a major headstart, the info on tv.com comes (mostly) from tv network's websites/public communication.

    • Re:Mirroring TV.com? (Score:5, Informative)

      by tabkey12 ( 851759 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:24AM (#13545146) Homepage
      Probably not, as I'd be willing to bet that when you submitted that information you signed your copyright over to TVTome, agreed by you in the Terms & Conditions of the site. Sorry...

      • Re:Mirroring TV.com? Oops... (Score:4, Informative)

        by tabkey12 ( 851759 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @05:22AM (#13545322) Homepage
        Actually, looking at the terms, I may have made a mistake. TV.com is now part of the CNET network and so is governed by the CNET Networks Terms of Use [cnetnetworks.com].

        The Terms and Conditions states that you grant CNET Networks a licence to use your information any way they see fit, but the licence is nonexclusive. Therefore, the users who contributed the information at TVTome (or TV.com) could add that information to the TVIV Wiki too. However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale.

        • However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale.
          It's pretty much impossible, TVTome didn't note who submitted what information. The only people who could edit existing info were editors for a show. Users could add notes to counter mistakes already posted but that was it. Also all posts had to be approved by the editor for the show before they
        • All the big companies do that with their "intellectual property" and hey wooptie, they have many more years of copyright proteciton because its a new work - doesn't this work here?
          "We changed a comma so its a new work!" :)
    • Depends on if you signed over your copyright with submitting or if you simply gave permission to TVtome.com to use the work in anyway they see fit. It could easily be either. I tried to check on archive.org but couldn't find the copyright info. Although, I think from a legal stance you have to have your own copy.
      • But can you really have copyright on the cast list for a show you took no part in? More importantly, what legal ramifications can tv.com take against a third party for mass mirroring data thats available from multiple sources? Obviously you'd have to leave out a lot of the real good info (spoilers, reviews, anything detailed), but atleast to get a nice eplist going I'd say atleast manual mirror/rewording would be great. Especially of the more complex shows that have a lot of info (Trek, Buffy, anything tha
    • Archive.org cache of TV-tome:

      http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.tvtome.com [archive.org]

      I think there's no problem in transferring most of that content to the new wiki.
    • At one point, I was working on a Python program that would act as a proxy, and would parse TV.com pages and make them look like TV Tome pages (I was using the Wayback Machine as reference). It was going to cache the pages from TV.com as I went to different shows' areas, and present them as one page if that was the way it looked at TV Tome. It would also remove all the flash ads that slow my browser down.

      However, I realized I was wasting my time and that it would not be a good idea, as I'd basically have to

  • Possible Problems with Wiki Medium? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Scoria ( 264473 ) <`slashmail' `at' `initialized.org'> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:23AM (#13545143) Homepage
    This seems as though it would be an absolute haven for trolls looking to provide "unsolicited" spoilers. Have the individuals responsible for the TV IV Wiki taken any precautions against this?

    • Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by amodm ( 876842 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:48AM (#13545227)
      IMHO in the long term, the positives of the wiki approach far outweigh the negatives.

      Look at wikipedia: some or the other time a page is spoiled, but its recovered very quickly and I believe its one of the most reliably informative sites on the net.

      The warning is there, because of the _potential_ of spoilers.

      One of the mechanisms in place is that no anonymous editing is allowed. People need to register to edit. That way, a spolier's account can be locked. For every spolier, a person would need to create an account. Its tedious in the least.
      • One of the mechanisms in place is that no anonymous editing is allowed.

        I really wish wikipedia would do that. Your right that spoiled pages get fixed quickly but that's only because a lot of people spend a lot of time doing nothing but fixing such crap. Including editors who are watching pages because they care about the topics rather than because they like fixing vandalism. Of course it wouldn't solve all wikipedia's problems but it would definitely take a chunk out of the amount of busywork created fo

        • The other side of the coin is that casual visitors who notice a small error or have a small snippet of information to contribute are likely to contribute if they can just hit edit and be done with it. If they have to go through a lengthy registration process, they're pretty likely to say "ah screw this" and move on. If the registration process isn't lengthy it doesn't provide much protection from trolls anyway.
          • Or they could differentiate between anonymous and registered. Registered users would be allowed free editing. Anonymous editors would require some validation, either explicit moderation, or perhaps peer moderation--the proposed edit could be posted and a registered editor could be allowed the option of validating it.

            Or some such...

            Xesdeeni
    • The old TVTome also had this problem, and it had (I believe) a bunch of full-time editors. The Stargate SG-1 section was especially bad - some episode descriptions were a one- or two-line description, and some were a full three-paragraph blow-by-blow retelling of the episode, complete with ending.

      I always treated TVTome as a useful resource for episode names (for renaming, erm, backups of DVDs that I own and had, erm, lost the box for, honest)... Avoid the descriptions for episodes you haven't seen yet and
    • First thing I did was look up my favorite series, Battlestar Galactica, and saw that they immediately gave away the surprise ending of the last episode.

      The old TV tome would give spoilers too, but there were protected under a "more info" type of link, as I recall, so you wouldn't see them if you were didn't request them.

      Other than that, though, it seems to be a useful site. I really missed TV tome after it was utterly butchered by tv.com.

  • Something Awful project (Score:5, Informative)

    by Idimmu Xul ( 204345 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:27AM (#13545154) Homepage Journal
    The TV IV stems from a forum on Something Awful [somethingawful.com] so with all that goon power behind it I'm sure it will snowball shortly in to a quite concise database.

    The cookery forum offshoot, GBS Food [gbsfood.com] is doing wonderfully since it's conception!

  • MythTV Integration (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The MythVideo plugin for MythTV has an integrated search of IMDB to look up information on movies. It'd be great if TV IV could provide easy to parse episode guide information for third party apps like MythVideo.

  • Wiki mostly US-based? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:51AM (#13545235) Homepage
    I'm wondering if we're going to get coverage of non-US TV shows (TV Tome used to do so and tv.com doesn't seem to [or if it does, it's barely any])? For example, on the home page of the Wiki it says "Catch every episode of the longest-running sci-fi show on television on Sci-Fi". Nope, we're not talking about Doctor Who (which is the world record holder), but apparently Stargate SG-1!
    • We would love it if the site became a multi-national resource. We just need multi-national editors.

  • Wow, thought it was just me! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by N8F8 ( 4562 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @04:59AM (#13545257)
    I used TVTome to regularly is was downright painfull when TV.com bought them out. Things that used to take three or four clicks were taking thirty clicks. Especially annoying is that their listings are alphabetic and paginated. So if you eant to find say, "lost" you have to page through a ton of pages to find it. Not to mention the cooler TVTome consent is gone - Bloopers and highlights.
    • So if you eant to find say, "lost" you have to page through a ton of pages to find it.

      Uh, no, you type "Lost" in the search box at the top and click the first result.

      Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good. I get the feeling tv.com have held back a lot of the tvtome content until they've had a chance to review it - they're a better target to sue than tvtome - but there's still plenty there.
      • Actually, IMDB is starting to suck too. Already you have to be a member to do stuff you could do for free. But I di like the little icons in search box though.

      • Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good.

        Yes and no. It's moving towards suckiness for sure. Now you have to register just to view the forums. Not that I usually don't register at forums I visit frequently, but that's still just plain stupid.

        IMDB as a whole works, but it's getting worse.

        TV.com on the other hand. First time I saw TV.com I thought I've mispelled tvtome and gotten to a some hijacked domain. Whe

      • Look, it's not that big a deal is it?

        For me it is. I'm not in the US, and many of the US series are shown here a year or two later. So I could read the reviews and such about episodes immediately after watching. However, TV.com apparently didn't carry over these reviews, written by editors who knew the shows and added to the experience with their insights. As these shows are "old", they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again, and unlikely to be of the same quality; in any case they have none wh

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

            No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.

            Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.

            Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.

            What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.

            Now, qyuickly! You will be timed: What was the significant event in Buffy season 6 episode 12?! Go
          • > Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

            *24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history.

            What was special about TV Tome is that it covered the shows of two decades ago as thoroughly as those of two seasons ago. You could ask yourself "Hmm, what was that early 90's show about a college campus, where the first episode had snow
          • It sounds like you are making a lot of assumptions in that, "As these shows are 'old', they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again".

            An assumption, based on my observation that none of the shows I'm interested in have any reviews (beyond the worthless one-liners people do now) at all in the several months since TV.com took over.

            Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

            It's easy to find out stuff about big shows like 24; it's the less popular ones that TVtom

      • Look, it's not that big a deal is it?

        I think it is. To me, TVTome was like Google... simple, clean, very few images. Now it's flash, bubbly tabbed buttons, and what was once simple lists are now tables. The Episode List has less info and (I personally think) wastes two columns on user reviews. I can't remember the TVTome layout but I think a quarter to a third of the right column was NOT flash, ratings, and (so called) "shows like this."

        I cringe everytime I have to look something up on the new TVTome. I

      • Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good. I get the feeling tv.com have held back a lot of the tvtome content until they've had a chance to review it - they're a better target to sue than tvtome - but there's still plenty there.
        It's still a big deal. A lot of the content missing are goofs/nitpicks/cultural reference items (at least for the shows I used TVTome for, namely all the Star Trek series). Not all the note
    • It turned into total crap (and given their abuse of stylesheets, much of it is unreadable crap as well).

  • Why Creative Commons? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deminisma ( 703135 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @05:12AM (#13545302)
    Seriously, could they have at least considered dual-licensing with the GFDL, so text could be borrowed from Wikipedia and vice-versa? This is a seriously counter-productive move considering that Wikipedia already has a wealth of information on television shows (see their pages on South Park for an excellent example).
  • As this is a wiki, the more people know about it, the faster it should grow. Help spread the word on digg:

    http://digg.com/links/Miss_TVTome_Check_out_The_TV _IV_Wiki [digg.com].

  • epguides.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by Morinaka ( 874174 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @05:47AM (#13545403)
    If your just looking for episode listings and the episode names, http://www.epguides.com/ [epguides.com] is pretty good. No flash ads or anything. It also links straight to the TV.com page when you click on the episode link. So that option is still available.

  • Still features neither have... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tatarize ( 682683 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @05:50AM (#13545409) Homepage
    TV.com is going to fall, they don't provide proper functionality. I miss my great list new shows on tonight. Without that function (which wikis do a sorry job at automatically creating) I don't see any sight holding my interest.

    TV.com has a what's on tonight thing, but it doesn't tell what is new and what's just on.
  • I loved the old TV Tome website. Being absorbed and ruined was bad, and revival is good. But why turn it into yet another wiki?

    <negativity>
    I'm not hard out against blogs or wiki's (and everything else thats popped up and become popular recently). But do other slashdotters think these things are making the web more bland, or making otherwise awkward sites easier to produce and more useful to surfers?

    My concern is, although a wiki formats are great for user contribution, they all look the same and this

    • Re:Another wiki? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by hool5400 ( 257022 )
      They don't have to look the same, but you are correct anyway, because most of the wikis popping up are just out of the box mediawiki installs. There's nothing stopping the guy from whipping up a new theme at a later stage.
    • Agreed, though for entirely different reasons. Personally, I just think a wiki is too freeform. Come up with a basic set of "objects" with defined fields, and it will be easy to get consistent information and plot the relationships between shows and actors and directors, etc. Run it on a wiki, and you'll have inconsistently-formatted, inconsistently-maintained data with no integration. Wikis are cool, but they don't solve every problem. And while I'm at it, the mediawiki code base is scary ;)
      • I just realized that I hit "Submit" before my thoughts really had a chance to solidify, so let me expand a little bit. The issue with wikis is that they're really based 100% on "presentational" notation -- especially mediawiki, which has no higher goal than "transform these tags into HTML tags by means of a mess of regexes", and which allows almost free mixing of its wikitext (which could almost be used for semantic purposes) with equivalent HTML. It's not structured enough; trying to get anything useful ou

  • Waiting for IMDB (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    TVIV might be a good short term solution, but I'm assuming that eventually the IMDB will redesign their television programming layout and as a result make TVIV obsolete. Most of the info is already in their database (episode lists, writers & directors of individual episodes, airdates, etc.), they just have to implement it in a more accessible way, for example give each individual episode it's own page so that they can be summarized, reviewed, rated, etc. -- something more akin to the old tvtome design.

  • Licensing? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @08:21AM (#13545968)
    For me the real question is what form of licensing they are using? Ive written some code that parses TV.com, IMDB and a few others to extract episode information and combined this with newzbin and a modified version of torrentocracy so that I have a MythTV based NZBTV channel (well several actually - drama, sci-fi , films etc) WITH episode information (it works quite nicely and will be even better when I integrate a search into it *grin*)

    Id LOVE to make the service and plugin available to others however most services attach nasty copyright resrictions to their content and episode guides so I couldnt embed the info in an RSS feed :(

    So heres hoping TVIV has a nice OS/GNU license...

  • Multi-show sites like TV.com can never compete... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tycoon Guy ( 914541 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @08:32AM (#13546027)
    ... with show-specific fan sites. Why would you bother going to TV.com, where at most you'll find a one-paragraph description of episodes that you've already seen, when a show-specific site can offer so much more information?

    If I want to know about Desperate Housewives, I'll go to Get Desperate [getdesperate.com]. For Lost, I visit Lost Media [lost-media.com]; for Family Guy, the Family Guy Files [familyguyfiles.com], and for CSI, CSI Files [csifiles.com]. I even still visit Crashdown [crashdown.com], a Roswell fan site, even though that show was cancelled YEARS ago. Most of these sites are updated several times a day -- TV.com can never compete against that.

    What I would really like would be an index to the best show-specific fan sites on the internet, for every single show that's out there. TV.com should just switch to that!

    • I used to use TVtome.com because it provided uniform data access to past episode titles. I could do something like this:

      1. Pull up a table listing of the episodes on TVtome.com.
      2. Cut and past it into Excel.
      3. Add a column for the status on which I have seen, which I have missed, which are on my TiVo, etc.
      4. Use that data to search upcomming listings on my feed based on episode title and my priority.
      5. Print out a weekly "program TiVo" checklist.

      This allowed me to select an older show which I may have not
    • But if I wanted to read about Danger Mouse, My Pet Monster, Denver the Last Dinosaur, or many other TV shows from my youth, TV Tome was a great, centrally located database for pretty much all the non-graphic data you could want about the show, and typically more than the fan sites would have.
  • I've been looking around for some kind of service that will let me choose the shows I like and then subscribe to an RSS feed that updates me whenever one of the shows I watch has a new episode, so I can set the PVR, etc.

    Anyone know of such a site?
  • They are not the second coming of christ. They shouldn't be used for everything and this is one example.

    if someone is to make a replacement for tvtome.com, I recommend he uses HTML/CSS/PHP and get on with it.

  • perhaps this will allow the community to rebuild what it has lost.

    The "community" didn't lose anything since the "community" didn't own TVTome to begin with.

    Max
  • Two points I want to comment on concerning the other replies so far:

    License - IMDb would be a great place to get data from, but the way they distribute their raw data at the moment is not very import-friendly. I guess they don't want to make it too easy for the "competitors". There are programs that import IMDb data into a database, but it's a tedious way. I'd prefer something ready to import into a database like .sql or .csv and something I'm allowed to use everywhere I please. When doing a TV data project

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