Picture this: September 2006 and I’m on an online forum watching Travis Pastrana doing the double back flip on a motorbike at the 2006 summer X-Games. Shoddy low-res streaming can’t take away the magic, but I want to see this baby on my big TV.

And so it begins.

Off I go to my favoured search engine and find that a search for X-Games gives 222 million results. Luckily the top result is for EXPN, the producers of the show. They’ve got clips, pictures and a tab that says ’schedule’. But … all the schedule tab tells me is when the show had first aired in August in the US. Being in the UK, and not having a time machine, this is useless. The other results I try are also no help. 222 million hits and I cannot find where or even if I could watch it.

Hmm.

I began to search for other TV shows on the web and found a similar problem. On Wikipedia people were manually trying to point fans at the shows they loved. Back then the Wikipedia page for the TV series Firefly had regular edits such as “being shown in Sweden in the summer, Channel X has said they will show Firefly in Greece” and so on (these are no longer on the Wikipedia page, lost in the murky world of user edits). This clearly illustrated that many others were having the same problem as I.

Hello LocateTV.

Colin

P.S. I did find the 2006 X games on the UK Extreme sports channel a month later through the highly technical process of channel surfing. Knowing it was now on I recorded all the episodes and eventually saw the one with the double back flip. It was worth the wait.