# Russian TV Rewind / Сетка Первого

> An interactive history of about 10,000 days of Channel One's Russian
> television schedule, from 1998 to 2026. Scroll through the changing schedule,
> then explore the same archive by program, date, category, or film metadata.

Russian TV Rewind (https://tv.vova.today) is a data-visualization project by
VOVA.TODAY. Its Russian title is «Сетка Первого» (Channel One's schedule).
It follows changes in the airtime given to movies and TV series, children's
programming, news and talk shows over roughly 27 years.

## What the data measures

- The source is Channel One's published schedule for its Moscow feed,
  collected from the 1tv.ru schedule API. Each source row identifies a
  scheduled airing by its date, start timestamp, and title.
- This is a schedule archive. It contains no audience measurements, viewing
  figures, transcripts, or video recordings. Schedule changes alone do not
  establish their causes or viewers' beliefs.
- Categories combine named-program rules, automated classification, and
  manual corrections. Film and series metadata includes production origin,
  release year and genre tags. Themes and IMDb ratings are also available
  where classification or matching succeeded.
  Themes and ambiguous title matches remain interpretive layers.
- The archive snapshot inspected on 2026-09-20 contains 243,753 source rows
  across 10,012 distinct broadcast dates, 1998-12-31 through 2026-06-04.
  “10,000 days” is the project's rounded description. The data does not
  automatically extend to the current date.
- The visual grid has a different count: its metadata lists 243,707 occupied
  slots before runtime gap fillers. Invalid intervals are excluded and some
  New Year intervals are reconstructed. Allocated binary cells, source rows,
  and rendered rectangles are different units.

## How to read it

- In the chronological grid, a rectangle represents a scheduled airing;
  its extent along the time axis follows its adjusted duration. Zoomed-out
  views retain short programs instead of reducing every hour to one winner.
- Grouped views rearrange the same airtime into stacks. Absolute volume and
  percentage share answer different questions: a category's share can rise
  while its total airtime falls. Check the selected period and denominator.
- Program categories, film genres, themes, production origin, and film age
  are separate dimensions. The film/series scope covers feature films and
  TV series; animation and documentaries have separate program categories.
- “Domestic” follows the project's production-country grouping, including
  Russia and the Soviet Union. Co-productions and unknown origin remain
  separate. Film age means age at the airing, not an audience age restriction.
- Missing data and inferred off-air gaps have different visual categories.
  Overnight and New Year intervals require corrections; their displayed
  boundaries are estimates from schedule records.

## What visitors can do

- Read the [Russian story](https://tv.vova.today/ru) or the shorter
  [English story](https://tv.vova.today/en), adapted for readers unfamiliar
  with Russian television. They tell different stories using the same data.
  A first visit to the root route defaults to English; a saved language
  preference can redirect later visits.
- Enter “Explore the archive” from the story. Switch between chronology,
  absolute stacks, and percentage stacks; change orientation; filter by
  time or program attributes; compare calendar dates across
  years; create locally saved custom filter groups.
- Hover or tap programs and highlighted phrases to inspect the evidence.
  Export story cards or selected views as images. The project also includes
  animation export and a parameter-driven export page.

## Sources and reuse

- Schedule: [Channel One](https://www.1tv.ru/schedule), via the API recorded
  in the reconstruction guide.
- Film matching and enrichment use IMDb datasets and supplementary records
  from TMDB, OMDb, Wikidata, Wikipedia, Kinopoisk and Kino-Teatr, followed by
  individual corrections. A metadata match is not a statement by the channel.
- The project declares its own code and visualizations CC0 1.0. That
  declaration does not cover the underlying schedule, third-party metadata,
  or fonts. Credit their sources and consult their respective terms.

## Reproduce this project

- [Build a TV schedule project from scratch](https://tv.vova.today/how-to-build-a-tv-schedule-project.txt):
  a standalone implementation brief for a coding assistant, covering acquisition,
  normalization, classification, title matching, interval corrections,
  binary formats, WebGL rendering, storytelling, exploration, localization,
  export, and static deployment. It specifies the work and acceptance criteria
  without requiring the original repository. Exact replication also needs the frozen data,
  editorial content and its translations, plus the reviewed corrections.
- [Project write-up](https://vova.today/works/setka).
- [Live project](https://tv.vova.today).