It's now nearly a year since the Coronavirus spurred us to massively expand our video listings: a search for all videos now shows nearly 1,000 results. We've become only too aware that this can be a bit daunting: faced with that much choice, how can you possibly decide what to watch?
So we've made some improvements in the last couple of weeks to try to make things easier for you.
First, we've started labelling videos with a note saying whether they're free to view, free but require you to create a login, viewable for a one-off payment, or requiring a subscription. On a phone, this condenses down to the word "Free", a person icon, a £ sign, or "£sub". We label most of our videos, but sometimes the answer is too complicated or we simply didn't know the details at the time the listing went in, so if you see a blank, that's why – you'll just have to try it and see.
Next, we've given you more control over the search results. There are four new tick boxes:
- Watch today limits the search to videos that are visible today. Use this when you're looking for something to watch now (or perhaps later this evening). Beware of time zones: a concert which starts at 8pm in San Francisco may have today's date, but it won't be watchable in Europe until well after midnight.
- By rating puts videos we've reviewed first in the search results, in descending order of how many stars we gave the performance. Use this to find performances highly rated by our expert reviewers. Note that the review might be of the video itself, or it might be of the live event that was filmed or a different evening in the same run.
- Recently added limits the results to videos we've published details of in the last 60 days and shows the most recently added first. Use this if you're a regular visitor to the site and want to find videos you don't already know about.
- Ending soon limits the results to videos which will cease to be available within the next 30 days. Use this to make sure you don't miss them.