It’s been a great week for FTABlog! First, it broke the story that another internet startup had begun streaming over-the-air broadcast signals as part of a subscription package. That this was a scoop really surprised me because I got the news from a FilmOn.com press release. Let that be a lesson to you about how much those press release services are worth.

Second, word of that scoop reached the broadcast industry news leader Broadcasting & Cable, which ran a story mentioning this blog in its second sentence. (Too bad the link tag got messed up somehow.)

And just when I was already happy about that recognition, I turned to one of my favorite blogs, Mark Evanier’s News From Me, and found myself at the top of another post. Evanier writes about all sorts of fun topics, including comics, animation, and writing in general. Only once in a while, he writes about his TV provider, DirecTV. After Evanier publicly wondered why DirecTV doesn’t carry C-SPAN 3 (long story), I sent him an email describing the Public Interest channel requirement and why it leads satellite TV providers to carry single channels from more, uh, lesser-known non-profit channels than a third channel from C-SPAN. And he published the email almost verbatim. I hadn’t polished it for publication, so using it like that was a great compliment. Thanks.

Ultimately, I’d love to make this blog more like News From Me, except with an emphasis on free-to-air TV. I’ll never be as prolific, and rarely as amusing, but I’ll try to post more often, even if the posts are shorter and without a big story. Like this one.

What would you like to read about? Leave a comment and let me know.

Just a short note to remind you that Daylight Savings Time begins for most of us this Sunday. Our weekend will be shortened, and we won’t get that hour back until October. At least the snow is melting and the flowers are thinking about blooming.

In particular, changing from standard to daylight time always makes the TV listings a little wacky. Different channels have different ways of expressing how they’re handling the 23-hour day, and the listing services don’t always translate it correctly. So if you’re in the habit of checking the movies & sports page to see what’s coming up, you might want to take those listings with an extra grain of salt. Or maybe with an extra hour, one way or the other.

We kept the same front-page logo

After much too much time finding problems and overcoming them, I’ve got FTAList.com version 2.0 available for public viewing. Just click this link to go directly there. Anyone using old .htm links will still see the old site, but you know better now, so you can see the new stuff.

The new site has a glossary (thanks for the suggestion), a troubleshooting section, and a fresher, cleaner look. The channel lists are now served dynamically, which means no more waiting for daily page updates.

The time spent getting everything updated has come at the expense of the channel updates (if that makes any sense), so the next few days will be spent getting that back under control. For example, ION (ion? Ion?) is apparently scrambled now.

Please go take a look and report any problems. The only one I’ve noticed so far is a problem with the borders of Deal of the Day in the front page using Internet Explorer 7. (Gotta fix that!) There are bound to be more, so either leave comments about them or use the Contact page (just fixed that one) to drop me a line.

The relaunch of FTAList is really close now. The completely redesigned database is working well, and the new basic page layout is ready. I had hoped for a Feb. 1 relaunch, but now it looks like it might slip a few days past that. It’s just as well, because it would be great to get more input about what features and directions it should go.

First, a few background notes. Although the new database is set up to include them, there won’t be any C-band listings … yet. There will be a Troubleshooting page to address the most common problems that FTA viewers run into. Each channel list page will include a notes section, where you can read about recently lost channels, for example.

But here are some questions that you can help answer:

• Should we recognize channel updaters? Some folks are nice enough to pass along reports of channels that they’ve found. Should they be recognized on the channel list the way that LyngSat does it?
• In what ways should the lists be sortable? By name, of course. By language (for satellite pages). By satellite (for language pages). Probably by transponder (on satellite pages only). Maybe a selectable include / don’t include circular-polarity channels button? What else?
• What to do with the Movies & Sports page? Back in the glory days of a couple dozen OTA channels on FTA, it made a lot of sense to use the Movies & Sports page to round up the sports and movies that they’d have available. With those channels gone, do you still want to see this roundup? If so, which channels should be included?
• Should we have a forum? There are any number of fine online forums where you can discuss satellite TV. Do we want one more just because it would be the official FTAList forum?
• What else? No single person ever has as many good ideas as the group has together. What other ideas do you have to improve FTAList? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.