Friday, April 11, 2008

Keep Track of Watched TV Show Episodes and Movies and Plan What to Watch!

I've been looking for something that the title explains for a while now. Only recently have I called myself to action to try and get something done about it. I wish IMDb.com or TV.com would add a feature for all us TV and movie freaks along the lines of keeping track of what movies we have seen, what TV show Season and Episode we are up to and so on. It would track every episode you have seen, perhaps suggest other TV shows to watch. I just want a no nonsense service that caters for today's download and consume society of entertainment seekers. It would also have when the next installment of your TV show or movie is coming up so you know when to watch your episodes or prequels by.

A mockup not very well thought through but you get the basics example I give below:



If you think this is a good idea spread the word. I know it might seem like a simple idea but I think it could be very effective and helpful to a growing number of people. I picture it as not being dissimilar to the way Amazon.com handles their recommendations system. If only they could add that to an optional part of IMDB.com or make a separate niche site. Anyways if you like the idea Digg the story and hopefully the collaborators that be will put this into motion.

What you would need is a Wiki style database of all TV shows and Movies and a tick box whether you've seen it or not with an optional episode rating next to it to gauge episode popularity. People from countries around the world should participate to make local content up to date as well.

View the 2011 updated edition of this post with solutions to the problems I presented in this post.

13 comments:

  1. I love the idea, if you've seen GoodReads.com I basically just want a version of that but for films and tv shows :D

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  2. There are already two "track your seen episodes" sites that I know about

    First one is http://www.sidereel.com/ but I must admit that because it's member-driven, it doesn't have the most accurate info.

    A better alternative seems to be http://www.mytvshows.org/ that imports accurate data from known sources like tv.com and epguides.com automatically. I've just start using it and seems very promising.

    Nothing about planning or movies though...

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  3. I like your idea, but it would be nicer if it was a systems connected to your cable/Tivo/Satelite provider.
    I figure that they can link to a provider such as tv.com and you can have Comcast monitor the shows that you are interested in watching. For instance, let's say you haven't seen an episode of Lost. Instead of you having to keep checking for it every week, it will monitor for that episode and when it comes on, it will be recorded, but no other Lost episodes will. Once you have seen a full season, it will archive that for you. After you have seen an episode, and you are ready to delete it, it will ask, "Mark as seen?" with a yes or no. More ideas on this that I will send to Comcast, but with general information given them, I will wait and see if they are interested in my idea.

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  4. What about http://www.myepisodes.com?

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  5. I also want a goodreads.com equivalent for movies!!!

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  6. Josh Goldberg1/10/2011 9:48 AM

    This thread is pretty old, but I found that one really great site for tracking movies and TV shows is Moki.TV. They also give you recommendations based on stuff you've watched. Pretty neat.

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  7. Unfortunately for mytvshows.org, you'll need a invitation code in order to register :(

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  8. I tried my tv shows and I couldn't find some of the shows I am watching. I love watching old shows and since I have netflix I have tons to watch. I am going to try some of the other suggestions here.

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  9. Personally I use followmy.tv works great so far :)

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  10. Have you tried LocateTV? http://www.locateTV.com

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  11. I use tvcountdown.com

    It tells me when the next episode of my selected shows are airing, but it doesn't keep track of what I have and haven't watched.

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  12. Geez, well an update by way of comment to this post from the original poster. Re-reading over this I can't believe how much the current services that I use for what I was describing in this post do exactly what I wanted when I wrote the post. This is by far the most visited page on a blog where most of the other pages aren't visited.

    My solutions these days that work perfectly for what I need and are free and don't require invites:

    As mentioned above by a commenter:
    followmy.tv
    For TV Show tracking and upcoming episode views and a fairly decent, growing community.

    iCheckMovies
    For checking off movies and some excellent functionality with regards to popular lists of top movies around the net that you can check off.

    And a bonus, fun website for passionate movie lovers who want to have a bit of fun ranking their movies into which ones are their favourites by having face/off matches between your favourite movies. It also keeps track really well of which movies you haven't seen and organizes them into a ranked list of best to worst as voted by the Flickchart community.
    Flickchart

    And of course if you don't know about IMDb by now you aren't much of a movie lover, but there is an equivalent television show and episode database that I use and find the best called TheTVDB. You can find the link below:
    TheTVDB.com

    So there you have it. I hope this little summary helps those of you who travel through here looking for solutions to a problem I had in April 11, 2008 that there are now sufficient and exceeding solutions for. If you know of any more that you use and love keep the comments coming.

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  13. Ha! This idea will never take off. Then again that's what they said about The Beatles & Led Zeppelin. You should sue people for stealing your patent!

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