The TV Room

Seems like The TV Room got into the hearts of many.

I can understand the decision, it must cost quite a bit to run a huge site like that, and keep it updated/maintained.

TV Room, TV Live and The Ident Gallery are my 3 favourite TV presentation sites, and it was because of those that I decided to make my own site. Of course mine will never live up to those, but hopefully people find it ok.
I am also starting a Channel 4 site as well.

Thanks again everyone at TV Room for the brilliant site, it really will be missed.

Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone for the many kind words in this thread.

Closure of the site is something that I've been contemplating on and off for a while. I have spent thousands of hours working on The TV Room over the last ten years. That's a hell of a commitment let me tell you! Judging by comments that I've read on this very forum over the years, there are very few people out there who appreciate quite how much work is involved in an operation like this.

A labour of love you could say. However, when something starts to take over your life to the extent that The TV Room has, you really need to sit down and give serious consideration to what you're getting out of it, what others are getting out of it, and what other things it's holding you back from doing.

With various other commitments, including a full-time job, I have concluded that I simply cannot get the two sites to a point where they'll realise their full potential. That's a source of great frustration. I know that if I had more time available, I'd be able to achieve amazing things with both sites. However, under the current non-profit structure, further personal investment in this project is simply not feasible and I am not willing to sacrifice paid employment in order to increase my commitment to The TV Room. That would be complete folly.

In recent years, I've made a number of attempts to secure sponsorship for the site. Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful. I am convinced that proper financial investment is the only way to create a really worthwhile resource that properly showcases the work of UK and Irish design agencies and which people will want to keep coming back to time and time again.

Over the last number of days, various people have approached me with proposals to help save the site. Some initial discussions have taken place. However, as yet, there's no agreement in place that will result in the sites remaining online beyond this month.

There have also been a number of enquiries regarding availability of The TV Room's content post-closure. Some content is being made available to a major, well-established site. This arrangement is not expected to involve a large volume of material. I currently have no plans to offer TV Room content to other sites.

I get that you can't afford to keep it up to date, but why withdraw what's up there already? Surely it wouldn't take any work to just "freeze" the site as a presumably fab archive.

Well unless he has got any sort of deal, he would still have to keep paying for the hosting, and for a site that size I could imagine it would cost a fair bit. But I could be wrong.

Well, you are but I don't get the impression from this thread that the hosting cost is the problem. If that's the case then it looks like quite an unreasonable declaration: "Pay me to keep the site updated or I'll take it all away, new and old". Strikes me as rather petty.

Hello,

I'm curious as to what you feel the flaws in the various proposals put to you were? I appreciate there was a lack of detail in the Metropol proposal although in part that was due to me writing it in a rush and (to be blunt) fishing for details on your own reasoning for closure before putting anything concrete down.

You've mentioned yourself that you're not the capper of all the material on the site and much of it is provided by the community. In part this shows the power of said community and indeed Youtube is further to this.

Therefore your role is more like a curator of material, putting it into a meaningful context rather than just a shambolic mess like youtube and also taking screencaps and giving a plottted history alongside.


The metropol proposal would be thus: to take the existing site as it is, and to get the remaining video up and into flash format in a nice manner.

We would then make use of our experience with the upload service to help get both new content and to imrpove exisitng information. I'm not suggesting a wiki, more a forum backend to the site.

Now why am I suggesting the upload service as such a good thing? I mean it's just a crap version of photobucket no? Well no, look at the requests forum. It had turned from the glory days of 2001-2003 where everything was shared into a horrid little dump where nothing would be uploaded and a certain trout based stooge would appear with his witty MP3s. Since the upload service appeared we've had not only two major threads of GMTV and BBC News music but a much higher response rate to other requests.

The easy to use interface, integrated login system and tagging systems have made it much nicer than having to try and use yousendit every time and then having the file expire after ten seconds.


So given our track record, and our links to this site and other bits of the TV Pres community, I feel we're rather suited to keeping the site working nicely, especially as the major parts can be outsourced as such, with posters given a specific set of technical standards to work by (e.g. mp4, set resolution etc) and we know how much our type like little guidelines like that


Now the only thing I really don't have information on Is hosting costs / bandwidth usage, but given that we already use a reasonably large amount of BW, have a profitable set of adverts and our hosts' major nark is processor time, I don't see this being a major issue.

Now I appreciate that you'll have got a load of emails from Max Douglas wannabes with hideous comic sans sites saying "OMG MYKE, PLEASE GIV ME UR CONTENTZ, MY SITE WILL BE BIGGER THAN GOOGGLE" but I would like to think the Metro-proposal has some grounds of longevity to it. I mean we've lasted five and half years on the context of bitching about this place, I don't see us disappeairng any time soon.

It just seems a shame to scrap such a well made site with so much info when it could be used as the basis for something greater, something you've said yourself you'd like to see.

I have to say Hyma, I like your proposal for what you'd like to do with The TV Room's content, I hope something comes of it.

Me too. Seems like a good way to not only keep the content online, but also to continue growing. It's a great resource as it is, and it would be a shame to see it all disappear.

Why not donate your library to to TVARK?

Would that just give TV ark the monopoly? Plus TV Ark have made noises before about wanting to be more about classic than contemporary.

Actually if I'm honest TV Ark irritates me, there are so many things odd about the site. I mean for a start the fact they've just redesigned not so long ago but are still stuck in a 800 safe design. Then we have their over complex "media delivery systems" and bizzare flash player system.

Then the images are all tiny. One particular strength of the TV Room is the images, they're big, nicely cropped and look really impressive on a page. From a design point of view a gallery can be a tricky thing to get right and I think TVR has nailed it. TV-Ark just looks cruddy and 1999 style in places.
Compare and contrast
http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/channel4/1982.html http://thetvroom.com/ch4/ch-4-01-01.html

Also TV Ark has an annoying manner of taking a "position" on some things which I feel doesn't help its aim to be a museam, it should be neutral.

Things like the image displays are actually an interesting concept in terms of design, what is the best way to do it? Should it be current TVR style or should the pages be more "at a glance" accessable with then images coming up in a lightbox carosel? (that's one of those things where the page goes dim and a gallery overlays) Does the lage number of images help or hinder? Stuff like this all needs to be considered when designing a site and it happens to be something I feel TV Ark doesn't do well.

Which is why I think it would be better to try something new, rather than just dump more content on there to overwhelm them further.

I take it you are one of those people who don't bother CLICKING the images?

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/channel4/c4_images/1982/c4_ident1987a.jpg

oh I appreciate they get larger on a click (didn't they just used to open the image direct, its better implemented now I note), I'm just not sure if it's the best way to display things initially. Course Idents.tv, a site that takes an entirely different style again, has a click to enlarge image system too, but then given that its style is not necessarily "gallery" then it's perhaps ufair to compare.

Actually the above post comes over a bit more catty than I intended, I was more trying to highlight the differences in style and risk of stagnation if everything was left to one site (although I do happen to dislike the video system on tvark immensely).