If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you might have gathered, I’m not someone who typically watches a lot of TV. When I’m not running my web design business, working as a programmer (full time) or doing adventure races and various other sporting activities, I do manage to squeeze in the occasional TV show but it’s not that high on my list of priorities.
TV Guide listing automatically shows what
Recently however, in doing my part to stimulate the local economy (and partly thanks to K-Rudd’s handout) I decided to purchase a new LCD TV which has meant that I find myself more interested in finding out what’s on the box.
Popular show listing gives you an idea of what others are into
Thus I found myself on the train last night, browsing the App Store from my iPhone looking for an application that would provide a TV guide for Australian viewers. Initially I started my search looking for a “TV Guide” which turned up applications providing guides for numerous countries, mostly in North America and Europe. So eventually after narrowing this down to TV guides for Australia I found a couple which looked promising. There was a paid app which costs $1.19 and a free app called Ice TV which I had similar reviewer feedback so I decided to go with that application.
The upcoming screen shows you when your favourite shows are playing next
As it turns out IceTv is a fairly comprehensive application providing TV guides for Australian users.
Before you can use the application you have to register a user account on the IceTV website but it’s easy enough to do this directly from your iPhone using Safari. Once you have registered, log-in to the application with the username and password that you setup during the registration process. Yes, this may be annoying for some users, but it’s the applications way of keeping track of user preferences and settings (such as what area you’re in).
Favourite shows tab lists the shows you have marked as favourites
Once you have setup your account, it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there. The application provides an intuitive interface that lets you view what shows are on for upcoming timeslots on any available channel with relative ease.
From the website, you can manage your account to indicate which channels you’re interested in, allowing you to de-select non-digital channels (if you don’t have a digital TV for instance). You can also select favourite shows and view shows that are popular based on other users favorites.
The settings screen
For most users, I suspect IceTV will nicely fill the need for an iPhone based TV guide. If you’re wanting something more, you could consider a paid account with IceTV or one of a number of other paid TV guide services which are out there. After all, if TV viewers are willing to pay a couple of bucks a week just to get the paper with the TV guide in it, surely there must be those who would pay a couple of bucks (as a one off) for an iPhone app that will do the same thing for you, day in and day out.
