World TV

Inspiration

Ralf is from Germany and got frustrated with how hard it was to watch free German television due to IP blocking. Because of public funding, these streams from ARD (the German public television authority) are free for anyone in Germany to view and because there is NO advertising and therefore no revenue, these are for the consumption of German nationals and German speaking lovers everywhere. This issue also applies to other countries such as France, Italy, and Spain. To view these, you have to VPN into these countries and then connect through websites or apps. While some content is not geoblocked, there is a significant amount that is.

What it does

Through a single app, someone on their IOS or Android device can use a single interface that streamlines the steps in which someone can find and access their favorite TV shows from back home. Instead of having to search through multiple channels or interfaces, we make it easy for someone to find their shows within a few clicks and to have it streaming. While us techies love VPNs, many people would not have a use case for it until now. We make it easy for them to sign up for one, using one with a 30 day free trial. It doesn't matter which VPN they use, as long as they use one.

How we built it

Filemaker Pro is very, very old school. It can't be killed. But it is very straightforward for developing apps. The wheel has already been invented, we're just putting some very nice hubcaps on it and making it look nice and palatable for the user. As with most content and especially with serial television, only the most recent episodes are available. So we have to link into the show's parent page so that it will stay up to date.

Challenges we ran into

For the demo purposes, we are purposely using the sites that DO NOT require authentication (user login). We all know how that affects the user experience. For the broadcasters, since there is no monetization and the condition for this commercial free content is taking taxpayer money, it is in their best interest to have the widest available audience. Each broadcaster has their own publishing methodology so with a little more time, scripts could be written to better scrape the sites for the relevant information. However, for this hackathon, it did take effort to manually scrape the needed info. And made just a bit more difficult since I don't speak any foreign languages but I guess that's what Google translate is for.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think this will make those a little lonely for home, feel a bit better in their travels.

What we learned

What's next for World TV

We hope someone likes this idea and will invest some resources into us to see if this can reach a wider audience.

Built With

• filemaker-pro