Countdown Premium vs Free

hi @ceralkiller,

Thanks for the feedback. I get what you're saying.

Premium users are first in line to use some of the new features we launch.
Only after some time has passed are Premium features made available to everyone.
We do this in part to reward users who support the site financially.

If you can think of ways that we can make the countdown more usable for free account users taking into account what I said above let us know.

cheers,

Jan

Cereal_Killer wrote:
Great feature, but for anybody who is not a premium user is pretty much useless. I like to think that there is a way to use if you don't have a premium account, but i can't seem to find any usage for it at least for me.

Well here are some ideas.

Everybody on this website is here because it's free and is using it for a certain feature or all. All of them are great, but this kind of a features are not that good because not everybody can use them.

My suggestions are as follow:
Premium Users: Have the ability to follow let's say 50-100 shows at the same time, have the ability to follow multiple networks at once ( this means they don't have to choose it from list). Have the ability to follow shows that are coming out in a time period more than a year from the date that they want.

Free User: Have the ability to follow maximum 50 shows at the same time. Has the ability to change the time period of the show followed up to a year from it, but no more. You can only choose different networks only from the list feature and seeing them in the one window.

There might be other ideas but for not this is a one i can think of. I'm writing here, but if i have to i will write in the forum.

You also have to keep in mind that running the site is not for free, it costs some money and a lot of work. And the three premium plans are really not expensive in my opinion.

It seems kind of pointless to me if the only useful feature is restricted to premium users. I'd say thanks for the effort, but.......

In case it's not clear, these are the differences:

Free:

Can only see 1 page (20 listings)

Can only filter by 'All Shows' and by specific country

Premium:

No page limit - IMO, it should probably have a page link which shows the premium box, just so it's clear there is no page limit

Can filter by all/country/tag/followed shows

Personally I think that the free version should show allow viewing followed shows (but only the first page, like the others).

As a sidenote, all countries can be filtered by (even if they're not on the list), i.e Germany.

OccamsRazor wrote:
It seems kind of pointless to me if the only useful feature is restricted to premium users. I'd say thanks for the effort, but.......

If you think that this is the only useful feature on tvmaze, then you probably should go to a different site for your tv needs.

The world of today is kinda strange, everyone seems to want everything for free...movies, tv shows, music, newspapers, education, innovation, progress and numerous other things, but I am asking myself who do those people think is working to provide all this for FREE?

JuanArango wrote:
You also have to keep in mind that running the site is not for free, it costs some money and a lot of work. And the three premium plans are really not expensive in my opinion.

Look i understand that running anything is not free, however to introduce a feature to a site you have add some usability to the person who is not paying. As i said i'm not asking to be free, but the current state of the Countdown feature is only usable for Premium users, users like me don't use it because it doesn't provide us with any usable feature that can be followed up on. Yes i can say that you can provided for free, but my suggestion is for you is to figure out a way to be both and premium feature in which for example free users can also use the feature. I mean that is why the website started to provide a certain features for free and eventually add additional parts of the features for those who want to pay.

My suggestions are base on what i think is the best way to utilize this new feature and make it Premium and Free at the same time.

Cereal_Killer wrote:
Look i understand that running anything is not free, however to introduce a feature to a site you have add some usability to the person who is not paying. As i said i'm not asking to be free, but the current state of the Countdown feature is only usable for Premium users, users like me don't use it because it doesn't provide us with any usable feature that can be followed up on. Yes i can say that you can provided for free, but my suggestion is for you is to figure out a way to be both and premium feature in which for example free users can also use the feature. I mean that is why the website started to provide a certain features for free and eventually add additional parts of the features for those who want to pay.

My suggestions are base on what i think is the best way to utilize this new feature and make it Premium and Free at the same time.

The thing is, if all new features are made available to non-premium users, then what is the point in even having premium features?
Premium users pay for a premium service, which includes features that non-paying users do not have access to.

Hi Cereal,

If you don't feel like reading the wall of text I wrote just jump to the tl:dr

I also get what you're saying. It's a difficult thing to balance. Free/Premium feature limiting.

To counter your remark regarding the free countdown being useless:
With the free version of the countdown you're able to filter the shows by: 'all', 'show premiere' and 'season premiere' in combination with the 'country' filter. Which f.e. can be useful if you're looking for something new to watch. What's not available for free are the personalisation filters.

Some backstory regarding our decision:
- I remember when we first announced Premium last year, we got a lot of remarks from users pointing out that it wasn't worth purchasing premium because the difference with the free version wasn't big enough. We listened to all of the feedback and have been implementing new features. Working towards making a product everyone thinks is worth investing in.

- I've said this a couple of times already: We give exclusive and primary usage to Premium for certain new tools. After a while these features might become available in the free version as well. The purpose of this is obvious: To reward users who support the site financially.

At the time of writing about 40-50% of our users are using adblockers. We don't even have that many ads to begin with and we are not going to counter this trend by increasing the amount of ads or blocking access to the site.

Premium users are our most reliable source of income and it's thanks to them that we'll be able to continue to pay our bills.

We spend more time than you can imagine working behind the screens to have everything running like clockwork and to provide continuous development.
TVmaze launched almost 3 years ago and has only been offline for 5min once.

TL:DR: We need to pay our bills. Premium helps do that.

cheers,

Jan

Well i guess i will have to explain my view a bit more precisely.

The Countdown feature is great, however since it's available to only premium users i don't know what is the usage for non premium users. Right now the best that i can get from the Countdown feature is that in maximum of 12 days i can watch some new tv series that i have never heard of or even seen being mention anywhere. This feature in the general sense to me should be from your favorites list to show you your countdown to series you are expecting or the next episode, but i guess this is the point of the calendar, so the countdown feature is a mystery to me what exactly is for. Also when you can't really know what the Premium users get access to in that feature is kind of hard to view your point of view.

So here is a another suggestion, that i think is a great one that anyone considering Premium or is a premium user will benefit from. Make videos of what is a premium user what benefits they have what features they have access or differ from free versions of that features.

As for the balance we can write all day long about and probably can continue this discussion for months if not years, but neither i no you as staff of this site have time for. I'm giving you my feedback on this website and that feature that you got us to access to Premium and non-Premium users.

The feature might be great in general, but we non-premium users don't know what that feature is for besides the blog post which doesn't do anything to give us a better understanding of it. So i suggested a few features or differences to add so that we free users can actually use it also.

Now about the balance, we know that balance will never be perfect and will never satisfy anybody completely, my suggestion came from my view and my usage of the feature. The feature at least for me is useless, because it doesn't provide me access to any of the menu options like Favorite Shows, or networks like USA, ABC, CBS and so on, networks on which most if not all of my favorite shows are. So when i try to use this features it doesn't have any useful info or suggestion for me because it only show certain networks and only works for 12 days at a time, which in the summer is pretty much useless because very few if any good shows start or return (know i'm wrong, but for me the good ones star in the fall or in the winter time period).

As for the site it self, the site is free for a reason for you to get more users without asking for fee to register, or to participate. So my view is based on that exact point. Everything i'm writing is on this.

Now about myself i will not go into details about myself, but i have lived in this world for while now, and i have seen a lot of websites created or add features to add more creative way to make money, to support the website or to plainly make it more usable or more appealing to a lot of people. The means they might add a certain changes to the website from free to paid to get it to be more financially sound for the future and more financially meaning for to continue as is. But in this world you can't satisfy anything no matter how much you try. For me i applaud your way to add new features and provide a reward for those who chose to pay for supporting the website.

Now features that are premium only i think should be marked as such and should be i think viewed in a different way than right now. When i try to click on a feature that is a premium only like in The Countdown feature i get a popup saying "Hey that is a premium feature only please subscribe and get access to it" (not exactly what is saying just what i see when the pop up shows). For me a better option would be to be let's say locked or even better faded out so that you can't click on it and next to it be the word Premium or a special P for it standing for Premium access only.

That said all my suggestions are made, by me for you to either consider implanting or just doing what is best for your side and say that this doesn't work for you and we might have a way to add a better version for it at a later date.

And the last thing on my list is this:

We have access to this great site, but i really don't know why i want certain features to be available for everyone (and no i don't mean free) i mean to be available to everyone in a way so that you can have them for Free and Premium users to be useful and provide more traffic for your website in the future, by being available something that is unique to this website. That means finding a balance and also being able to give premiums users something for when they pay the money they wanted to spent, by subscribing. This for me is something extremely hard to do and will probably never be done. But i wanted to exercise my point of view by suggesting a ways to improve on feature that you introduced and is not very useful to me. So i gave a suggestion, which turned into a discussion about paid users vs non paid users and giving paying user a better experience on a website that they decided to support. Now my views my differ from yours, because we are different people and different people view everything differently, but i suggested something i thought would be a great for the website which turned into a discussion about stuff that should have not been discussed here. So i'm sorry about that. So i would like to end this with my view and to tell you this:

I suggested something! Not always my suggestions will be good, but i might from time to time to suggest adding a feature or changing a feature or giving an idea for something, but it's my view of how the website can be made better so i hope i can be useful with my suggestions and can make better this website. If not then sorry to have wasted you time.

Cereal_Killer wrote:
Well i guess i will have to explain my view a bit more precisely.

The Countdown feature is great, however since it's available to only premium users i don't know what is the usage for non premium users. Right now the best that i can get from the Countdown feature is that in maximum of 12 days i can watch some new tv series that i have never heard of or even seen being mention anywhere. This feature in the general sense to me should be from your favorites list to show you your countdown to series you are expecting or the next episode, but i guess this is the point of the calendar, so the countdown feature is a mystery to me what exactly is for. Also when you can't really know what the Premium users get access to in that feature is kind of hard to view your point of view.

So here is a another suggestion, that i think is a great one that anyone considering Premium or is a premium user will benefit from. Make videos of what is a premium user what benefits they have what features they have access or differ from free versions of that features.

As for the balance we can write all day long about and probably can continue this discussion for months if not years, but neither i no you as staff of this site have time for. I'm giving you my feedback on this website and that feature that you got us to access to Premium and non-Premium users.

The feature might be great in general, but we non-premium users don't know what that feature is for besides the blog post which doesn't do anything to give us a better understanding of it. So i suggested a few features or differences to add so that we free users can actually use it also.

Now about the balance, we know that balance will never be perfect and will never satisfy anybody completely, my suggestion came from my view and my usage of the feature. The feature at least for me is useless, because it doesn't provide me access to any of the menu options like Favorite Shows, or networks like USA, ABC, CBS and so on, networks on which most if not all of my favorite shows are. So when i try to use this features it doesn't have any useful info or suggestion for me because it only show certain networks and only works for 12 days at a time, which in the summer is pretty much useless because very few if any good shows start or return (know i'm wrong, but for me the good ones star in the fall or in the winter time period).

As for the site it self, the site is free for a reason for you to get more users without asking for fee to register, or to participate. So my view is based on that exact point. Everything i'm writing is on this.

Now about myself i will not go into details about myself, but i have lived in this world for while now, and i have seen a lot of websites created or add features to add more creative way to make money, to support the website or to plainly make it more usable or more appealing to a lot of people. The means they might add a certain changes to the website from free to paid to get it to be more financially sound for the future and more financially meaning for to continue as is. But in this world you can't satisfy anything no matter how much you try. For me i applaud your way to add new features and provide a reward for those who chose to pay for supporting the website.

Now features that are premium only i think should be marked as such and should be i think viewed in a different way than right now. When i try to click on a feature that is a premium only like in The Countdown feature i get a popup saying "Hey that is a premium feature only please subscribe and get access to it" (not exactly what is saying just what i see when the pop up shows). For me a better option would be to be let's say locked or even better faded out so that you can't click on it and next to it be the word Premium or a special P for it standing for Premium access only.

That said all my suggestions are made, by me for you to either consider implanting or just doing what is best for your side and say that this doesn't work for you and we might have a way to add a better version for it at a later date.

And the last thing on my list is this:

We have access to this great site, but i really don't know why i want certain features to be available for everyone (and no i don't mean free) i mean to be available to everyone in a way so that you can have them for Free and Premium users to be useful and provide more traffic for your website in the future, by being available something that is unique to this website. That means finding a balance and also being able to give premiums users something for when they pay the money they wanted to spent, by subscribing. This for me is something extremely hard to do and will probably never be done. But i wanted to exercise my point of view by suggesting a ways to improve on feature that you introduced and is not very useful to me. So i gave a suggestion, which turned into a discussion about paid users vs non paid users and giving paying user a better experience on a website that they decided to support. Now my views my differ from yours, because we are different people and different people view everything differently, but i suggested something i thought would be a great for the website which turned into a discussion about stuff that should have not been discussed here. So i'm sorry about that. So i would like to end this with my view and to tell you this:

I suggested something! Not always my suggestions will be good, but i might from time to time to suggest adding a feature or changing a feature or giving an idea for something, but it's my view of how the website can be made better so i hope i can be useful with my suggestions and can make better this website. If not then sorry to have wasted you time.

This was a good read and some suggestions I really liked. TVmaze grew rapidly the last years, so server costs and stuff also grew and the owners have to make the premium feature worth something and right now it is absolutely fine to ask a few tiny bucks each month. TVmaze is not asking 50 bucks each month, it is less than a big cup of coffee at a nice café :) Almost everything is for free around here and the site is nicely organized with a lot of cool features. So if people think a cup of coffee each month is too much to pay, that is fine, no one gets forced to pay and everyone can enjoy the site for free. But the people that are supporting the site financially absolutely deserve some cool features the free users do not have (right now).

The small fee is a token of appreciation for all the hard work a few people are doing to keep this site running now and hopefully running for many more years to come :)

cheers
Juan

@Cereal_killer:

Just to clarify, premium users are not able to filter by network.

Like I explained in my previous post, the only differences are no page limit and the ability to filter by a tag or your followed shows.

If you want that, I suggest you vote for (by following) this thread:

http://www.tvmaze.com/threads/2521/tv-countdown-additional-filters

(Whether additional filters would be added as premium only or not, I don't know)

Hi Cereal,

Now we're getting somewhere. Thanks for the suggestions:

-make videos showing the premium features.
-mark more clearly what the premium features are

If you have any others you're welcome to share them.

cheers,

Jan

JuanArango wrote:
If you think that this is the only useful feature on tvmaze, then you probably should go to a different site for your tv needs.

The world of today is kinda strange, everyone seems to want everything for free...movies, tv shows, music, newspapers, education, innovation, progress and numerous other things, but I am asking myself who do those people think is working to provide all this for FREE?

I am retired. So my contributions to this site and others (not about TV at all) are free. I haven't "worked" (for pay) in years. I contribute to this site and a few other non TV related sites cuz I care. TVMaze and other sites benefit from my input. Free of charge.

JuanArango wrote:
This was a good read and some suggestions I really liked. TVmaze grew rapidly the last years, so server costs and stuff also grew and the owners have to make the premium feature worth something and right now it is absolutely fine to ask a few tiny bucks each month. TVmaze is not asking 50 bucks each month, it is less than a big cup of coffee at a nice café :) Almost everything is for free around here and the site is nicely organized with a lot of cool features. So if people think a cup of coffee each month is too much to pay, that is fine, no one gets forced to pay and everyone can enjoy the site for free. But the people that are supporting the site financially absolutely deserve some cool features the free users do not have (right now).

The small fee is a token of appreciation for all the hard work a few people are doing to keep this site running now and hopefully running for many more years to come :)

cheers
Juan

I make my own coffee. Am on Retirement Benefits so can't afford extras. I contribute to this site and would like to do more...free of charge.

suemac wrote:
I make my own coffee. Am on Retirement Benefits so can't afford extras. I contribute to this site and would like to do more...free of charge.

:)

@cereal_killer I think this thread can be closed. The countdown transitioned to being free back in 2017. :)

https://www.tvmaze.com/blogs/28/christmas-updates-and-features

@suemac Thanks for helping out, very much appreciated. We can use all the help we can get.