[mythtv] Re: Myth recommendation system

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:47:23PM +0100, Charlie Brej wrote:
> Mike Benoit wrote:
> >Its so I can find NEW and hopefully
> >DIFFERENT programs that I will likely enjoy. Especially since I skip
> >commercials, I rarely see advertisements for new programs, I have to
> >rely on word of mouth to hear about them.
> 
> I totally agree. This is why I find the TVPicks from websites/magazines 
> being fed in very useful. The ones made by RadioTimes (good old BBC) are 
> pretty good.

The first blush I have done at a recommendation system in tvwish uses
a combination of genres and titles you have recorded in the past, your
explicit requests for people, genres, titles, movies, pilots and other factors,
and a bit of randomness thrown in.

It's actually working pretty decently, though I am sometimes not sure if using
past titles is a good idea.  But I turn off those I don't want, though
there is not yet a GUI for that.

There are many purposes for a suggestions system.  As I explain in more
detail at:

    http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/suggest.html

the suggesttions system becomes your replacement for surfing.  Instead of
browsing over whatever happens to be randomly on live tv (and then being
unable to fast forward or skip commercials)  you surf over a somewhat
less random collection of recordings in spare disk space.


I think that for the second class of recommendations, critics are the way
to go.   I would love for somebody to build a site like rottentomatoes.com
which would aggregate tv critic's opinions (they all get the shows in advance
and write about them before they air) the way rt does movie reviews.

Then tvwish could easily import that into mythtv.


BTW, I have updated tvwish's suggestion system recently to work without
the programid, so if you are outside the USA and wanted to try it,
give it a spin:

         http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/tvwish.html