Finding a programme’s information site using channel4.com’s search box used to be a pretty frustrating exercise. A typical search for Desperate Housewives came back with a remarkable number of results.
It seems quite fundamental but in creating a navigation that didn’t explicitly shout ‘Programmes’ anywhere we were doing a disservice to the vast majority of our [...]

Update: There has been quite a lot of interest in the papers about this post, which was intended to serve as a preview to changes to the existing Catch Up service on channel4.com. To reiterate what my colleagues have written elsewhere, the work to revamp our Catch Up player has been going on for some [...]

Two weeks ago we launched a new homepage on channel4.com. We took onboard some feedback when the new page went live, including comments that the page didn’t work if you didn’t have the right version of Adobe Flash installed, or were browsing the site on an Apple iPhone.
In a patch released yesterday, we hope to [...]

Amongst the big trends at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in America was a renewed interest in television sets that come pre-packaged with connectivity to the web. Intel and Yahoo! announced hardware deals for TVs to ship with the CE3100 chip that uses both the Yahoo! Widget Channel technology and a version of Adobe’s Flash [...]

Whilst the overwhelming response to the new Channel 4 home page has been positive (bold design, clearer navigation, etc), one or two of you have pointed out that the experience of the new home page has been left wanting on some browsers or devices. It appears that on the latest Firefox browser, for instance, users [...]

Did you know that you can get behind-the-scenes access and chat with other fans of Channel 4 shows on social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook? Here’s a run-down of some of the C4 ‘presences’ out there in the wild.

With the launch of channel4.com’s new Programmes area, our audience has a consistent way to access all the information we’ve got about a broadcast episode. Clips and pictures from the show, features written about the people in the programme, and transmission information are all browseable. Some programmes have more information available to the website’s visitors [...]

You may have spotted a new look for our TV Listings pages. It’s the first attempt at making the guide to what’s playing on the Channel4 group of channels more engaging. The EPG shows the output of the five core channels for the entire Catch Up window (around 30 days looking back) and around two [...]

Fans of Channel4 TV shows have a new place to soak up their favourite shows. Channel4.com aims to be the source fans turn to first for content around each of its television shows. In this post we take a look at a few ways we’re trying to deliver on that promise. We’ll run through a [...]

Channel4 broadcasts challenging, award-winning television programmes. And for almost a decade, Channel4’s online team has been busy crafting thousands of TV show microsites that aimed to reflect the values of its TV shows.
Those sites – such as the Big Brother experience and the official Hollyoaks site have proved popular hangouts for show fans to catch [...]