The television listings site Zap2It has just rolled out a website re-design that has dropped most of its customization features in favor of lots of large graphics, making it nearly unusable.
So I’m looking for an alternative – recommend away!
Zap2It seems to know that there are problems. In about half-an-hour, the boilerplate on their feedback auto-response went from:
*Registered Zap2it users, your location, lineup, service provider and favorite channels have been transitioned to the new Zap2it site. *
to:
Registered Zap2it users, your favorite channels have been transitioned to the new site. We are continuing to work to transition all registered user’s location, lineup and service provider settings.
Actually, nothing seems to have made it – I had to re-enter my zip and provider, and got a listing of every channel I can get, in apparently random order, with no way to choose or order them.
I was sooooooooo disappointed today when I went to check what was on and saw that atrocious mess. I loved having it highlight my favorite shows, show only the channels I wanted. It logged me out, so when I got to the log in screen, it said “Please log in. New users will be able to register later in April” or something similar. I am hoping that means they’re not done tweaking things and that it might go back to something resembling its prior incarnation or features. I went to their facebook page and people are PISSED. I am too. I mean, it looks exactly like all the other ones. Why am I going to use it when I can just use my crappy cable provider one instead?
I knew something was up the last few weeks too because every time I added a show to “my favorites”, it wouldn’t show up the next time I returned and I couldn’t find a “contact us” page.
Crapcrapcrap! I used Zap2it as well! I selected my mother’s favorite channels and saved them as FAVORITES. After that, it’s easy to print up the day’s TV schedule for her. It was simple and easy-to-understand. She’s early-stage dementia, and any regular TV listings I’ve found are too confusing for her. The TV Guide is right out.
I need to find a replacement, quick-like. Dammit, I had other things I’d rather be doing with my evening than solving a problem I thought I had solved.
Count me in as another person who thinks the new site sucks. Normally I just deal with format changes but this just out and out blows chunks. Too much large graphics, not enough actual info, took me way to much effort just to get current listings, can’t look up when the next episode of a show will be broadcast on PBS.
Any alternatives that provide INFORMATION rather than pictures and gossip crap?
Funny, but this was the only page I could find on Google complaining about Zap2It’s website redesign. I really wanted to send them a message/e-mail slamming them for springing it on us, but I couldn’t even find contact info for feedback on their site. Typical. Maybe I’ll just send an e-mail to webmaster@zap2it.com just to vent.
The funny thing is, I was able to find my personalized schedule – with apparently all of my settings still intact – here:
And I can’t claim to be clever, just lucky. I was looking for alternatives, tried tv.yahoo.com, and was pleased to see that zap2it was still honoring their contract/agreement with Yahoo! However, I don’t know how long this will last, so it’s probably a good idea to start testing alternatives, just in case:
Of these three, I know titantv the best… the nice thing about it is that it supports the two key features I like about the ‘old’ zap2it website: 6-hour display and personal channel editing/selection. Also, I had trouble getting the other two to work on the stock and Opera browsers on my Android tablet.
Some six and a half years ago, zap2it pissed off the DIY PVR/DVR community, which had been scraping data from the site for their homebrew PC-based video recorders, by changing their website. I understand why zap2it did this – they didn’t want their servers and bandwidth used by end-users from whom they weren’t getting any credit for ad-revenue (or any other kind of revenue), so they (in effect) blocked them. But I think they’ve now managed to also piss off the ones from whom they were getting ad-revenue… it’s hilarious to me that they seem not to have learned anything from the last time they changed their website and inconvenienced their members.
Titan TV looked close to what I wanted, but the channels don’t go over 99. I don’t know why - maybe it doesn’t know my provider HAS over 99 channels. Other TV sites have 2 selections for my provider, regular, and with the modifier “digital”. It’s like they don’t know about the extra digital channels.
Yeah, I’m giving up looking for the night. I’m gonna stick with the link I quoted, print a few days in advance, and hope it sticks around a good long time.
Thanks so much, dechat!! There was a lot of swearing at our house when we discovered zap2it was hosed at the same time! I tweeted them and immediately got several re-tweets, so there are a lot of ticked off people.
I’ve been looking at TV Titan, and it’s bearable, but we had several of our channels moved around Christmas and it’s showing the old numbers.
Last week a well-known HD torrent site finally did it’s promised website change to awful effect; lotsa JavaScript and impossible to find the Linux distros of your choice.
It lasted two days and then reverted.
Also see Cracked, Slate, AVClub, TechRepublic and, I’m told, SBNation.
lost is the easy pull down for jumping to dates and times.
lost is also bringing up a show’s listings in a new tab/window, where you would get all upcoming new episodes and another click would give all upcoming episodes new and old. this was useful to plan when you might view a show.
Still a problem at deChat’s link, but we’ll take what we can get.
Woo-hoo! I add my thanks! They even auto-logged me in.
This re-design makes the recent Yahoo! and My Yahoo changes look … slightly less bad. At least those didn’t destroy core function.
I’m worried the tvschedulezap2it won’t work for long. I tried titan today. I think for those of you not getting the right listing to play around with the providers. Plus I think you can manually override some of the names and numbers.
It is still too colorful for me in all its options, and the monochrome mode isn’t colorful enough. It was a huge pain in the ass to line my channels up in the order I like them (I like to have the kids channels all grouped together, even if they’re not numerically near each other, for example). But it’s ok enough. If the alternative to zap stays up I’ll go back, but I’m not holding my breath. On the facebook page, they did promise some of the now-missing features would return, but that’s stupid. Don’t change your website so much that it’s unusable, then say “Oh, it’s just temporary.” Don’t change it at all or don’t roll it out until it’s ready.
I don’t like captchas, but if there was hotlinking and server abuse, that’s just one way to inhibit that. Don’t make the site an unusable mess that is no different than anyone else’s. Grrr.
Hi deChat, I am still very pleased with the link you sent way back April I believe. I am now wondering if you or anyone has found a way to enable a ‘favorite’ to stay marked after closing the website etc.
I find it so easy to miss a program without it being marked.
Look forward to your reply or if anyone else can give me some insite…many thanks.
