How to get notified of new TV shows

Help & Support
#1

assuming you know of a TV show and that you want to watch it, you can easily set up Sonarr so that it will automatically follow (through whatever indexer) and download (through whatever client) new or old episodes for you. awesome.

unfortunately, that is a big assumption: not always I already know what TV shows are airing, or whether I’d like them.

is there a way, either through Sonarr or through other software, to get notified of new releases?
I would LOVE a software that will send me a notification saying, e.g.:

Brave New World
Season 1 - released on July 15th, 2020"
IMDb @ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9814116/
RottenTomatoes @ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/brave_new_world
MetaCritic @ https://www.metacritic.com/tv/brave-new-world

so that I could decide whether to add it to Sonarr and start the workflow we all know, or skip it.
this would happen only once for each TV show, or at best once for each season.

do you have any suggestion for this?

#2

It is a good idea, but you can do that from manyother sites.
i Use trakt, on your calendar you create a filter to display series premieres so i have every month a clear image.

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#3

thanks for the reply, but could you give me further examples, other than Trakt?

:slight_smile:

unfortunately, the feature I’m talking about is not something I have seen implemented anywhere.
the main point is to automate the discovery of TV shows, just like Sonarr excels in the automation of download/storage.
IMHO automating the discovery means, at least:

  • aggregating information, e.g. finding the proper page on each major review website, and providing links or even pre-parsed scores, just like I did above manually.
  • notifying in a proper manner, because a calendar isn’t.

(either you manage to get event notifications for every premiere date, and then you’ll be spammed by your own calendar app, or you don’t and you will definitely miss out on something.)
e.g. a custom RSS feed, or email notifications, or even a Telegram/Signal/Matrix bot, would keep you in control of the data flow.

but then again, I wouldn’t like to just get notifications that release New.TV.Show.S01E01.1080p.GrOuP.mkv came out! I would need some context, a link to imdb, tomatometer, that sort of thing. :sunglasses:

#4

Let’s elaborate a bit. I have a custom calendar with filters as you can see from the picture. I do not get flooded from series premieres of some channel in Alaska, i have specific and for this month are 13, which is the exactly amount of needed.

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That Calendar you can make it an .ical or RSS Feed (check the link https://blog.trakt.tv/ical-and-rss-feeds-f2028da560e3 ) s basically you can create alerts on almost anything you can thing off.

#5

I don’t think that will work for me, but I understand your point… I will check Trakt out.

do you have other suggestions? other websites?
am I the only one hoping for a solution like this? :smile:

#6

it seems Trakt cal/rss feeds are… a paywalled feature? :-1:

even more so, then:

#7

i think the finger down emoji is a bit unfair.
Hope you find the free stuff you are looking for.

#8

really? paywalling RSS is quite low for a number of reasons.
in any case, I did not know that Trakt was in it for the bucks.

we could discuss about the irony about a thumbs-down emoji being unfair in the forums for Sonarr, which egregiously lives in the gray area of the web, but that’s off topic.

back on point: you mentioned multiple times that you knew “many other sites”.
could you mention a few, please?

#9

again unfair. You seem that you do not know a lot about how the whole scenerary of this things work. A bit naive mabye.

well, i have donated in sonarr, radarr, bazarr , couchpotato when it was already deat, sabnzb and almost on everything iopen source i use. When i like a site and has a subscription that it offers what i want from that site i pay for it. have you ?

Aren’t you paying for Usenet or you are on free torrents, i guess the second.

Yes i could, but you must pay the site for their services.

Good luck, i would not start a flame war here.

#10

I’m experienced enough – I may be principled, but not naive.

subscriptions and donations are very different concepts.
donations rely on folks chipping in to, e.g., sustain server costs, whereas subscriptions quite often overflow in the profiteering zone.

I am not willing to allow people to profit from piracy.

so you are not willing to pay for whatever tv channel is airing your favorite show, relying on usenet instead, but you are willing to pay for an rss feed?
anyway, you could name these services for the sake of other interested users reading, but yeah, I’m not interested in paywalled stuff.

this discussion is not inflamed, but merely off-topic.

#11

NOT THAT I DO THIS…BUT…

I would use SABnzbd as my download tool of choice and then use it’s built-in RSS feature to find new TV shows by searching for example ‘S01E01’ in the NZB title. I would chose to add the episodes to a SABnzbd TV queue in ‘Paused’ mode, so they do not automatically start downloading. I would then check the queue daily and download or delete those i am not interested in…simple.

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#12

hey @DerekWilliamsUK, that is certainly a reasonable approach! :smile:

if I’m not mistaken, though, such process would still need me to manually carry out all the research in order to understand whether the show is good enough: e.g. take a look at imdb votes, rottentomatoes consensus, and so on.
so I would still have to read the title of a tv show, then go on several review websites to get an idea of the consensus, and finally decide.
that’s the same as reading through a preDB, after all. :confused:

anyway, thanks for letting me know your take on this!
as I was writing, I still feel a bit surprised that everybody deals with automatic download but nobody seems to be interested in automated discovery, now that new streaming services and content are popping up almost daily. :laughing:

#13

True, you still need to follow a manual process. Here is another free tool that i use to track all current/new TV shows. TV Calendar by POG Design

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1 Like
#14

thanks for the further link!

again, though, my point would be to improve the automation of my process.
I’ve already automated this “discovery” process somewhat, thanks to some scripts on my part, but my solution wouldn’t be able to compete with any Sonarr-style discovery tool.

I guess there isn’t any?

#15

I use that too. Also helps you keep track of what episodes you have and haven’t watched.

#16

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