With summer here and the fall TV season still months away, how do you decide what shows you might want to stream on your HDTV or tablet to fill the void? Ask your friends? Check out your Netflix recommendations? Consult tea leaves? Wrong, wrong, and oh so wrong. At least according to Televisor, a new site/recommendation engine launching Wednesday that aims to take what you like and spit out other stuff you'll like too. I got to play around with a preview version of the site—which has the tagline of "Discover Great TV"—for a few days, and it definitely shows some promise.
Start typing and Televisor suggests shows it thinks you might be searching for.
Visit Televisor and you're greeted with a big search box with the words Find me a show to watch like… with a Recommend button beneath it. The button is somewhat pointless, because as you start typing, a drop-down menu appears with suggested completions. (The only time you'll then see the Recommend button is if you enter something not in Televisor database.) You can scroll up and down within the list, and when you select a show from the menu you're taken to a page of recommendations based on that show.
A search for U.K. workplace comedy The IT Crowd, for example, turned up an expectedly large batch of British shows like That Mitchell and Webb Look, Coupling, and Rowan Atkinson's wonderful Black Adder, but also short-lived (and underrated) American workplace comedy Better Off Ted, Scrubs, Community, and Eureka. All solid choices. And on the recommendations page for The Big Bang Theory, I'd seen every episode of six of the first eight shows (even if the results were tainted a bit by Two and a Half Men appearing in the group).
A results page based on The IT Crowd.
At the top of the results page are several buttons, one for each genre of the show you started with (you can select more than one to focus results); Recent and Classic buttons that let you narrow by the age of shows; and Hulu, Amazon, and two Netflix buttons (one with a maple leaf, which I assume is for Canadian Netflix subscribers) that let you see only those shows available on the services to which you subscribe.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon