What Channel is United on?

Why?

Football TV rights are ridiculously complicated and so understanding which channels will show which match in the UK is surprisingly difficult. I normally have to go on and check each channel but that was getting frustrating and so I built a site to answer just that question. When you go the site it says exactly which channel the next Manchester United match is on.

The story

In 2017, I built this site but never published it using a calendar feed and parsing the TV schedule by doing fuzzy text searches across the show descriptions and for a number of channels for the match time in the calendar. Interestingly the Premier League signed a deal with Amazon to show a number of the matches on Amazon Prime which meant they were not listed at all in the TV schedule! This completely broke my site so it lay dormant.

Due to the closing of stadiums to fans more football matches were to shown on TV and the rules which ones are shown and what channel got even more complicated. This annoyed me enough to where during the absolute destruction of Manchester United by Tottenham that I finally wanted to find a solution and after finding a decent API containing all the information I managed to get the first version built during the match.

Implementation

This is a static site hosted on netlify and is re-generated every 24hrs using a github action to trigger the build. During the build process it calls into an API to get the latest information and generate the new page. There is a slightly different design depending on the channel its on so that you don’t even need to read the text to know where it is.