My employer has just launched the open beta of a new website called locatetv. It’s not something I’ve worked on, but I sit next to (and regularly drink with) some of the guys that do. I think it’s a pretty cool site, and encourage anyone with an interesting TV to check it out.

The general idea is that you type in the name of a TV-Show (either the series name, or a specific episode title,) movie or cast member, and the site searches TV listings local to you and shows you a list of the next few times you’ll be able to see what you searched for on TV. That’s pretty cool in itself; it’s a bit more targeted than the numerous TV-guide style websites out there, and the site itself is lightweight and fast to use, so it’s a lot less painful than (say) the Radio Times site.

The really neat feature, though, is the embeds. Designed pretty much specifically for bloggers these allow you to embed a small applet in your own site that links to a specific show or movie or actor. That means that, for example, if I want to talk about a specific episode of Heroes (let’s say Godsend), I can stick this on the site:

That box is generated every time this page is viewed, so it always has up to date (and local to the reader) schedule information in it. In a TV themed blog that would be an extremely useful tool. It means that users who didn’t watch a show, but have their interest piqued by the post find out automatically when they can next catch it (rather than just being told when it was on – maybe in another country,) which in turn increases the chances that they’ll be back to comment on the post, and be more likely to revisit that blog in future since it provides useful information. It makes the reader’s life easier, and generates more traffic and comments for the blog: Everyone’s a winner.

Of course, I don’t often blog about TV, so it’s probably not the most useful tool in the world to me, but there are a lot of sites that would really benefit from this sort of thing and I’d love to see it succeed.