TV Tome

» see tvtome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Cataloging American network television by episode number was a hobby that required you to be watching American network television. In Turkey between 2000 and 2005 the shows arrived when a channel bought them, dubbed and out of order, sometimes years behind. There was no season to track because nobody here was on the season.

So TV Tome is a site I have to reconstruct rather than remember. It opened on 11 July 2000 under John Nestoriak III with a structure that reads as obvious now and was not obvious then: every series got a page, every page got a volunteer editor, and that editor was responsible for filling in air dates and episode summaries for every episode that had ever run.

No network was doing this. In 2000 a television studio's idea of a website was a Flash splash page for whatever was airing that month, and anything older than the current season had no record online at all. The people who wanted that record built it themselves, for free, and it took them about four years to assemble the most complete English-language television database in existence.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

The editor system is what made it hold together. One person owned a show and had commit rights on it, so the guide for an obscure 1970s series was as carefully maintained as the guide for whatever was airing on Thursday, provided somebody cared enough to claim it. Users below that level could submit corrections and trivia and the editor decided.

That model sat somewhere between a wiki and a forum hierarchy, several years before Wikipedia settled the argument about which one works. It produced roughly 2,500 complete series guides and about 3,500 partial ones by the time of the sale, plus the guest cast lists and the continuity goofs that later got scraped into half the television reference sites on the web.

~ the sale ~

CNET Networks bought TV Tome on 22 April 2005 for a figure reported around five million dollars. CNET already owned Download.com and GameSpot and had learned that a well-maintained database was worth more than the content around it, and they had bought the tv.com domain to put one behind.

TV.com launched on 1 June 2005 carrying TV Tome's data. Twelve days later, on 13 June, TV Tome was dissolved and its address pointed at the new site. Everything the volunteers had written was there. The interface around it was a CNET property with advertising inventory to sell.

~ what got buried with it ~

The volunteers mostly went along, because the alternative was abandoning several years of their own work. That is the quiet part of an acquisition like this one. The complaint, where there was one, was never really about money. It was that a group of people had built something as a commons and then discovered the commons had an owner who could sell it.

TV.com itself ran until 28 June 2021, then closed too, and the database that started as a hobby in 2000 stopped being available anywhere in one piece. CBS had bought CNET in 2008 and by the end there was no business reason to keep a free episode guide alive next to a streaming service. Both graves are in this cemetery now, which is a reasonable outcome for a thing that was given away twice.

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