LocateTV is a web service that lets you search for TV shows, actors, and movies and it will tell you when they're on TV next. Hooray. Their PR department (well, one persistent PR person) has been up our ass constantly for the past 3 months. Since TechCrunch isn't sending any good leads my way this morning, I go to the e-mail account. According to the latest message, they're going to launch on Monday.

But My Media Center PC Already Does This

And TiVo might, too. I don't know because I don't have one. Any readers care to enlighten?

They gave us a beta account, so I started fucking around with it. First, I search for The Sopranos. Sure enough, there it is. I can see all the episodes in all the seasons, and a little snippet of text describing each one that is less interesting than the larger description on hbo.com. It can also show me upcoming showtimes, of which there ARE NONE because David Chase is an asshole.

Sorry about that. I'm still bitter.

Anyhow, you can also search for actors. I search for Kevin Spacey and find out that K-PAX is on today at 1pm. Fantastic. On my media center PC, I could tell it to record the movie. Turns out, they haven't coded that feature into Ajax yet, so Web 2.0 can't do it. Fail.

When You See It, You'll Shit Bricks

Anyway, it's not that impressive. It is likely backed by PHP, and is probably rife with mysql_query() calls. They have a "fuzzy search" feature, which means that someone on the development team figured out how to call levenshtein() in PHP. Fun Fact: scanning over a large database with this function will destroy and semblance of scalability you think you have. I am sure they're going to learn that the hard way, though.

I'm going to give LocateTV a whole-hearted "meh". There's nothing terribly innovative or interesting there, but by the same token, there are no spectacular fails. In fact, I'm having a hard time paying attention to this article as I write it. Fuck, what do you want from me? It's almost the weekend.