One of the things I’ve learned during the two or so years I’ve edited this site is that blog like TV Scoop now play an important role in creating buzz for a particular programme or series a head of time, and also give TV viewers an open forum to voice their opinions on a show they’ve seen the night before. It’s the water cooler effect – people want to share their experiences of the night before’s television. They want their opinions to be validated or to disagree with someone. That’s what we at TV Scoop hold dear – the chance to interact with readers about our televisual experiences. Now, there’s a new website that brings all the discussion under one roof, and uses the BBC’s world-straddling website to power it. So what, and where, is it?

The BBC has received a bit of a kicking recently, the latest accusation was that the corporation took too many people to Glastonbury and larged it for the whole weekend. For what it’s worth I thought those criticisms were lame and just another excuse to bash the BBC by the right-wing press. Glastonbury is massive, I was thankful for the corporation’s coverage, not just on telly, but on the radio and online. It was, generally, great.

Anyway. I also read an excellent piece in The Independent by Gerard Gilbert the other day, asking whether the current financial climate and the budgets cuts to drama departments at ITV and Channel 4, for instance, has led to a dangerous homogeny in the industry. The Beeb, with its license fee, doesn’t have too much trouble producing interesting and generally decent dramas, but the problem is that no one else can afford to make any. That’s a true enough point, and you can argue whether the Beeb has too much of the pie until the cows come home.

The reason I’m blathering on about the BBC is that shownar.com is powered by the BBC, and designed to create, document and chart the buzz surrounding new and forthcoming BBC shows.

One of my former colleagues at Shiny used to bemoan the fact that BBC had, with its superb iPlayer service, eaten up so much bandwidth on the interweb, that there wasn’t a lot of room for anyone else.

Shownar.com, after looking at it, uses links to the iPlayer as its backbone. You’re greeted by a snazzy, Eighties-influenced home page (a riot of colour in the banner), and then, if you click on, say, Top Gear, you’ll be taken a page where you can see who’s been taking about the show on the net, a graph charting the daily ‘buzz’ and, of course, a link to the iPlayer episode(s).

There’s both telly and radio programmes but, of course, this is a bit of BBC love-in. It’s nicely designed, easy to read and navigate, but I found myself asking what the point of it all was.

Yes, it’s a bit of an umbrella site, where loads of links to other sites are provided. That’s interesting, but if you want to watch a specific show on iPlayer why not go directly to iPlayer?

Still, the site is in its protoype stage, so why have a look and see what you think? Shownar.com