TV Guide Plus

~ the obit ~

Gemstar's first hit was VCR Plus+, the numeric codes printed next to newspaper listings that you punched into a video recorder so it would tape the right thing. TV Guide Plus was the same instinct taken further. Instead of you carrying the schedule from the paper to the machine, the machine would receive the schedule itself, and show it to you on the television, for a full week ahead, free.

It went into sets in the United States and Japan in the middle of the nineties and reached Europe in the following decade under the name Guide Plus+, where by the early 2000s it was running in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and several smaller markets. The list of manufacturers who built it in reads like the whole industry of that period. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp, Samsung, LG, JVC and Thomson under the RCA and GE badges.

The set in our house had teletext, and that was the whole of it. You held down a number and waited while pages cycled, and the listings were somewhere in the two hundreds if the channel bothered. Turkey never got Guide Plus+ in any form, so what I know about a television that could show you next Thursday's schedule and set a recording from it, I know from reading about other people's living rooms.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

The delivery mechanism is the good part. An analog television picture has a gap between frames while the electron beam returns to the top of the screen, and those blank scan lines carry no image. Closed captioning already lived in one of them. Gemstar took lines eleven through eighteen, plus twenty and twenty two, from cooperating stations, and pushed a week of listings for every channel in the region down that gap.

The bandwidth was tiny, so a new set could take up to twenty four hours to fill its guide the first time you plugged it in. You left the television on the right channel overnight and in the morning you had a schedule. There was no subscription and nothing to configure past the region setting, because the data was riding along inside a signal you were already receiving. When the digital transition came, the American version moved to an out-of-band data channel in 2006 and got longer descriptions out of it.

~ what it was really for ~

The listings were free to the viewer because the viewer was not the customer. A banner advertisement sat on the guide screen, which meant Gemstar had built an advertising surface into the furniture of several million living rooms, one that appeared at the exact moment a person was deciding what to watch. That was the business, and it explains why the company was willing to give the data away.

The other business was patents. Gemstar held a wide portfolio on interactive program guides and spent years enforcing it, and that portfolio outlived the product by a long way. It passed to Rovi, which was still suing companies like Hulu and Netflix over guide interface claims years after nobody could get listings on a television set anymore. The courts eventually rejected several of those claims.

~ the long tail ~

The ending was slow and nobody announced it properly, which is why the dates on this grave are soft. Rovi started winding down the North American broadcast data in 2012 and most sets on that continent had lost their guide by the spring of 2013. Europe held on for another three years and then went in a staggered sweep, country by country, between June and September 2016. Official notices confirmed the whole thing was finished by the start of 2017.

What killed it was not a competitor. Digital broadcasting carried its own schedule metadata in the stream and the operators had guides that came with the box, and Rovi worked out that licensing listings to those operators paid better than giving them to viewers. So the free option was withdrawn, and televisions with a dedicated GUIDE button on the remote were left holding a button that does nothing.

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