The ongoing struggle

Dear Lazyweb, do you know of a particularly good online TV listings site or application?

We don’t watch a lot of TV, but from time to time there’s some good stuff. I prefer to sit down once a week and look through what is on, save it to a list and then program it in to my PVR. At the moment I use Radio Times, but the site is often down for hours at a time. It’s rather frustrating when I’ve found time to program the PVR but the list of what I want to program is locked away inside a broken web site. The programme guide on the PVR itself is a bit cumbersome to use.

So, anyone got any good alternative sites / services?

Required features:

• Save shows to a list, diary, whatever
• Save shows with series link or at least to save every instance of that show name on that channel
• Has all UK freeview channels
• Customised channel list

Would be nice:

• Able to dump out the list of saved shows, their times and channels so I can still program stuff even if the web site is down
• Radio too

Radio Times fits the above requirements, but as I say it’s very unreliable. DigiGuide looks like it might be good, but it’s a Windows-only application. They say they’ve been working on a Linux version since 2007. I’m currently trying tvguide but am not sure about its “favourites” feature.

I would probably be willing to pay up to £1/month for a service that met all requirements and was actually stable. I know that TV listings data is not free to license. Anyone know how much it costs out of interest?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 22:56 and is filed under Lazyweb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.