Never Miss Your Favorite TV Show Again With Remember To Watch
Back in the 80s life was not easy for people enjoying a good television show. If you missed a show it meant that you either had to be lucky to watch rerun before the next episode or to know someone who taped the show on VHS. If you were unlucky you missed the show with no option to watch it before the next episode aired.
Today things are a lot better for tv junkies. If you miss your favorite show you have a good chance to find it online available at an official site or if you are really desperate as a stream or download on third party sites.
Remember to Watch offers an online service for people who want to make sure not to miss a tv show when it airs. The service is limited to US television shows and can either email your or send you an SMS to remind you that your favorite tv show is about to air.
The homepage displays a list of upcoming tv shows. Each show is displayed with its name, tags, the time it airs and two links to subscribe to reminders. Here it is possible to subscribe to a single episode or all future episodes of that particular show.
You can only subscribe to tv shows and events if you have an account. Registration is free and should not take more than a minute. Email notifications are enabled by default. A mobile phone number needs to be entered before mobile phone notifications become available.
All subscribed to tv shows are displayed in the members area after log in as well. Here it is then possible to unsubscribe or change settings like the alert time which can be changed from 30 minutes to 15 or 60 minutes. This is the time that you receive notifications about an upcoming tv show.
Many popular shows are available for selection. while you find lots of tv shows there it is likely that you won't find all listed.
Remember To Watch nevertheless is an interesting service for users who need a reminder every now and then to watch their favorite tv show. This obviously works best if they are near a tv. One of the uses could be to act as a "end work for the day" reminder if the tv show happens to air in the afternoon / evening.
You can try out Remember to Watch at the official service website.
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This is a pretty cool service. Of course, any “reminder” web site (or desktop tool running in the system tray — or, as Microsoft now wants us to call it, “the Notification Area” — of an always-on-and-Internet-connected desktop computer) which uses email and/or text messaging as its method of reminding can accomplish the same thing. This site is little different other than it’s specific to TV shows. And, don’t get me wrong, that’s pretty cool, as very vertical, narrowly-focused reminder sites go. This one seems particularly good.
As a parenthetical aside, though, I notice that even the main, over-the-air networks (NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX) are all beginning to do what cable networks (FX, TBS, etc.), and movie channels (Showtime, Cinemax, etc.) have been doing for years: Re-running stuff on a second night in a given week.
For example, when “Law & Order LA” first started, I notice that it ran on its regular night, and then they repeated the episode later in the week… on Friday or Saturday, I believe. I’m too busy to notice if that show’s even on the air anymore, lately; but my point is that when I was watching it I noticed that NBC was running each episode twice, on different nights, each week. NBC is currently doing that with “Harry’s Law,” too. CBS and ABC and FOX also do much the same with certain programs. This new and interesting habit that the big-four networks are now doing can help, a lot, when it comes to getting caught-up on missed episodes.
Of course, a DVR (or even an old-fashioned VCR) can make all the difference. Back in the ’80s and some of the ’90s I used to work late so many nights each week that I routinely had a 6- or 8-hour VHS tape in my old Sony VCR, and I programmed it to record a show or two each weeknight, often to the maximum 8 hours worth of programming each week that the tape would hold. Sadly, I almost never got caught-up many weeks because so doing would mean that those 6 or 8 (or however many) hours worth of programming would have to be watched during the weekend… and I never had time then, either.
The other philosophy I’ve developed about all this is that missing episodes can have an up-side later, during the summer, when entire seasons are often re-run (though, with the newer “summer replacement” mentality which most networks now have, that actually isn’t as viable as it once was). Networks, I notice, also re-run a lot during the actual season. Long gone are the days when a network television season consisted of 26 episodes per year… 13 of them broadcast during the autumn months starting in September, and 13 broadcast starting around the second week of January. In recent years, most networks purchase sometimes as few as just 13 episodes from the production companies for an entire year… ostensibly so that they may do the “mid-season replacement” methodology whereby an existing hot series is interrupted in January so that a new one can be introduced in its timeslot until it gets a following; then the new series is given the timeslot of something else which gets cancelled after Christmas, and the interrupted series resumes. TV networks are really BIG on that one, in recent years… a system first tried by NBC back in the days when “NYPD Blue” was still in production and broadcast in primetime.
Which brings me to a point which circles back to the need for this “Remember to Watchh” web site: The networks are all so greedy and impatient, now, that they rarely give marginal programs much of a chance to earn an audience and loyal following. If the Nielsen ratings aren’t good by usually the second episode, the show is either moved or removed. By the second or third week of some years’ new fall TV seasons, I’ve seen some networks play such musical chairs with programs that one almost NEEDS a service like “Remember to Watch” just so one can… well… remember to watch!
Of course, the big networks are like this, now, because there’s so much competition from not only cable networks, but also the Internet. Long, long gone are the days when there was only the three big networks, plus a half dozen or so smaller local UHF stations on the exclusively over-the-air TV dial. (Yes, I’m old… I remember when there was only black and white TV). Cable TV changed everything for the networks; and now the Internet is driving the nail into the coffin.
Back in the ’70s, when the TV show “M*A*S*H” was brand new and being broadcast by CBS in primetime, it got TERRIBLE ratings at first. Seriously: So bad were its ratings, by today’s standards, that it would have been yanked after just the first episode if it were a new program these days. But the head-honchos as CBS had a gut feeling about it, and let it run, banking on that it would catch-on. And, boy, did it ever! It became the most-watched program on TV; won tons of Emmy awards; and is, to this day, one of the consistently most-watched programs in syndication in the history of television. Something like that could never happen today because the networks are so sensitive to competition from cable and the Internet that most programs have but one or two episodes to either catch-on, or be summarily cancelled.
It’s funny: I remember when cable TV was just a dream… something coming… a new technology that no one believed would catch-on. (Again, I’m old.) In fact, I remember how movie theaters believed that cable TV and its promised movie channels which would play entire films, unedited, and without commercials (Showtime, Cinemax, etc.) would be the proximate cause of their ultimate demise… which it sort of ended-up being, history tells us.
Now, though, cable’s getting a little dose of its own medicine from the Internet. Ha! What goes around, comes around, I guess. [grin]
Anyway… enough reminiscing.
Good recommendation on the “Remember to Watch” site. Thanks!
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Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
I actually do something very similar for a few tv shows that I like to watch. Instead of watching them on a weekly basis I wait until they are available on DVD to buy the whole season and watch it whenever I feel like it. For some shows I waited until they were canceled to get the “all episodes all seasons” box set.
I do hate today’s rating obsessiveness as it gets many good tv shows canned that I personally like a lot. Then again, my taste is probably not that mainstream.
I could not more strongly agree! After getting too busy to keep watching “The Wire,” for example, I got the boxed set. Same with “The West Wing.” So I know EXACTLY what you’re talking about! It’s an excellent way to see every episode… and on one’s own schedule, to boot. The only downside is that one’s not able to stand around the water cooler the day after a given episode’s broadcast and talk about it. I’ve run away from more than one water cooler in my life with my fingers and my ears, saying “Stop! I don’t want to hear it and have it spoiled! La la la la la la…”. [grin]
Thank goodness for boxed sets. My very first one ever was Ken Burns’s epic, “The Civil War,” originally broadcast on Public Broadcasting (PBS) in September of 1990. It remains, to this day, the most-watched series in PBS history. The boxed set (VHS tapes, back then) was gifted to me. I still love it. It’s a classic which, in my opinion, every American should be required, by law, to watch, and be tested on. [grin] (kidding, of course)
Oh… wait… I had one before that: Shogun, which, as I recall, aired, as a mini-series on ABC in… let me think… like the early ’80s… maybe even very late ’70s… can’t precisely remember. That was a surprisingly good series, for its time: Introduced most Americans to the great Toshiro Mifune, and the then- (and still- actually) quite hot Yoko Shimada…
…whom (the latter), in subsequent years, proved herself to be just a little bit crazy (in a completely good way, mind you). Little known fact: Shimada, at the time, didn’t speak a word of English, and so every single syllable she uttered in the entire series was learned and spoken entirely phonetically. Her English, to this day, isn’t terrific; but back then she didn’t even know how to say “hello” or “thank you” in English. Quite a feat, all things considered.
Shogun was so good (given its times) that even Richard Chamberlain couldn’t screw it up. We obviously had James Clavell (the author of the novel on which the TV series was based) to thank, in largest measure, for that!
But, again, I digress. [sigh]
Gregg DesElms