The TV Times, They Are A Changin'

Or maybe a better title would have been, Long TV Times Gone. In today's Los Angeles Times was the last issue of the TV Times, the free TV guide that has been a weekly staple of the newspaper since, will, since I can remember.

Over the years the "magazine" had gotten smaller, with most issues containing one half-page article and the rest of the content being lists of "Highlights," sports, talk shows and soap operas. Oh, and lest I forget, a TV crossword puzzle at least as daunting as that which infests the TV Guide.

They say the feature is too expensive to keep producing, though to have it at all during the past year you had to call the LA Times and request that it be included with your paper. So given that, it's not surprising that economically it no longer made sense. If you make something harder to obtain, less people will obtain it and the cost of producing each copy of an item will go up, not down. You didn't have to be a genius to know for quite a while that the Times was looking for justification to kill this feature.

The only thing we used it for was looking at the list of movies in the coming week. My wife would go over all the four-star films and tell me which ones I should TiVo. You will notice from the list of features above that the TV Times no longer carried a list of films, the loss of the feature is really no big deal in our family. I think rather it speaks volumes about changing technology.

The Times is replacing the TV Times with more daily and weekend TV coverage in the paper, though I would not be surprised to see that slowly shrink over time. They are also increasing the usability of their TV Times web site, to allow you to customize your own TV listings. Lots of other sites already do this, so I'm not sure what they hope to gain.

All of this got me thinking about an idea I once had for TV listings. It was 1990 and I had just quit my job at EDS (Electronic Data Systems) and moved to Taft California where my wife was starting her first job as a City Manager. Taft was a small oil town on the southwest rim of the San Joaquin Valley on top of the Midway Oil Fields, one of the world's largest oil deposits. What was a computer programmer to do in that type of environment?

Well, mostly I became Mr. Mom, taking care of our three-year-old son, but I also took a three-pronged approach to making money. Prong one was I made shareware. Prong two was I worked in town as a PC consultant for homes and businesses. Prong three was I thought up products. It was prong three that brought me to the idea of a TV guide on a CD. For a buck a week you would be sent a small database on a CD, along with retrieval and interface software, and it would contain the TV listing for your area. I had no idea where you got this information or how much it would cost. The idea never got much past the kicking it around with people stage, but even then I knew what I wanted.

You would be able to keep a list on your PC of your favorite shows, movies, actors, directors and subjects and each week this list would be passed against the database to build a personal schedule of shows you might like to watch. You would even be able to rank your choices, i.e., look for Marlon Brando movies before looking for John Wayne movies, etc.

A week or so ago, when thinking about the impending death of the TV Times, I realized that my dream product was on the market and that I have owned it for three years now. It's called a TiVo and using its WishList feature it does everything I planned for my Optical TV Listing. Besides my TiVo I have another DVR in my house, one supplied by my cable company. It's a lot less expensive than the TiVo, but all it can really do is record series that I tell it to record. It is very difficult to tell it to record movies (you basically have to manually scan a channel for the week to see what is going to be on) and it knows nothing about actors, directors or keywords/subjects.

TiVo is not my planned Optical TV Listing, it is my product on steroids. I never even contemplated controlling the TV and a VCR let alone the non-existent DVR. I like what the people at TiVo have done with my idea and I don't think I will miss the TV Times much at all, something the Los Angeles Times figured out as well.