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Zap2It Labs Discontinuing Free TV Guide Service
QuijiboIsAWord writes "Zap2It Labs, which provides free TV listing data for personal use, has long been the main source of program guide information for users in the US and beyond. They've announced via their webpage that,
due to abuse of the service, data will no longer be available after September 1st. There is no other direct source, and no option to pay for the service even if the users wanted to. Without a data feed of this type, users will be reduced to scraping websites at best. Is this going to be a killing blow for MythTV?"
Based on their previous complaints and this message, I think the problem was people were using the free data set, then redistributing it, probably for profit, possibly indirectly (say, selling devices that used Zap2It's free service). Zap2It makes money selling their data set and they were very generously offering it for free to individuals. But you weren't allow to redistribute it.
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I've been a Zap2it subscriber for at least three years for my MythTV.
At first, they made me fill out a big online survey as "payment" for the service. The first time it was about 30 questions.
The third time (this is like every 3-6 months) they only asked one question.
For the last year, the survey has been "click here to renew."
What's with that? I'm willing to give up some personal time and info to pay for this service, and they can't even think of a way to leverage that?
According to a posting on mythtv.org...
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /275533#275533
And it isn't just MythTV that uses the guide data provided...
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
Tribune put new management in Zap2it. They have been unresponsiveand treated the Data Direct service like a redheaded stepchild for a year now. The data has been bad, with long outages on it from time to time for a while now. Many of us that have used myth and other xmltv systems have tried to pay for a subscription for a couple of years now and they refuse.
it's the new management, they hate that OSS people are getting access to the data and want to stop it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While no longer linked from the front page, this link still works.
Basically, the content was provided free provided it remained for non-commercial use. After all, commercial ventures have to pay for those listings and if they could get it for free, nobody would pay.
I hope they at least tried to weed out the abusers before just cutting the cable.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Shouldn't Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or any of the other big media / tech companies of the 21st century provide this information as a free WebService? Seems like something Google would jump on top of since their mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Well, TV listings is information.... get on that Google!
This was always MythTV's achilles heel, more than even HDTV. For all the talk about "Unlike Tivo, MythTV can NEVER be shut down or crippled," MythTV always had this dependency on a third party, for profit service. It's possible someone could replace them, but they're going to want SOME form of revenue (and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
MythTV can read the broadcast schedules on the airwaves - see EIT. At least that's what I use in the UK. I can also still scrape the Radio Times website in XMLtv as well.
Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously
Not having to deal with commercials inserted when you fast forward 30 seconds.
Now, if they could only find a way to strip thos FREAKIN' RUDE graphics that certain vile channels overlay on top of the movie/show. I can deal with a tiny little station identification, but those rude obnoxious ads obscure vital parts of the show about one out of every 3 times. I swear my Blood pressure goes through the roof.excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What if I was to write a web service that exposed the data garnered from website-scraping? You could just write a standard XML request, wrap it in SOAP tags and send it to the web service, and you'd be returned whatever information you requested- by channel, time, or show name...
Any takers?
Now there's just the question of who? Who is expert at spidering the web? Who likes to provide new cheap-to-free services in their quest to take over new markets. Who would love to put yet another spike into Microsoft's side by removing yet another possible revenue source for them? Who doesn't have to worry about financing such a small, cheap service alongside their already multitudes of underutilized servers and bandwidth?
Google?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely
Given the choice between:
1. paying Comcast's fees, DVR service, etc
2. paying Tivo or
3. paying for a subscription to an XML TV Listing service, and keeping my MythTV box
I'll take #3.
People will pay for it as long as no free alternatives are out there.
For those folks with DirecTV, that's not an option. In fact, at this point, we have no options at all other than writing a guide scraper for TVGuide.com. Fortunately, their website data is fetched in Javascript using xmlHttpRequest, so it is probably straight XML in some dialect that could be converted into the same format as Zap2It uses with very little effort. If done carefully (request the entire schedule exactly once, then only refetch the current day each day and fetch any new days added to the schedule), it might not add enough server hits for them to even care.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sure it does...you just have to buy it from someone who preconfigured it...just like they did to your TiVo.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites.
That being said, you can't honestly suggest that MythTV is always a better choice than Tivo, unless you've conveniently forgotten about the teeming masses of people who couldn't install a capture card if their life depended on it. Ease is the killer feature for Tivo and bundled PVRs.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
They rely on advertising to make money and aren't going to freely help people with a device that most people are going to use to skip advertising.
They seem to forget that a substantial chunk of those viewers wouldn't be watching at ALL, if it weren't for DVRs. I like a show that's on when I'm usually playing with my kids. If I didn't have a DVR, I wouldn't watch that show period. Yes, I skip through many of the commericials during playback, but not all of them, and not if the commercial catches my eye, or is for a product I'm interested in. I even rewind to watch a commercial from the start (like if I skip into the middle of a Mac/PC ad I haven't already seen) etc.
Before I had a DVR I hit mute and/or pipped the commercials while I browsed the channel guide, or checked on the hockey game, or something. Its not like I was sitting there 'attentively watching' all the ads before.
I expect advertisers are probably losing eyeballs overall as people adopt DVRs, but its probably not nearly the issue they think it is.
I was happy to find your clear, concise, comment down here all by itself. It makes it easy for a clean response.
Let's say that MythTV implemented your paid service plan and began charging the princely sum of $2 per month for the data.
I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge. It would be a daily torrent that you could pull, or a streamed RSS feed, a static layout site with a downloadable screen scraper, or any one of a dozen other ways I can think.
So now instead of a million dollar revenue stream you'd get a thousand dollar revenue stream coming from the 500 users who would actually be wiling to pay when a free source is available.
If you can answer the question of how to prevent the above scenario from happening I can put you in touch with some content providers who will pay REAL money for your idea. The kind of money that allows people to retire for life...at the age of twenty.
I've seen some of the newer LCD HDTVs sold here in the U.S. which have the ability to display program guide data, no doubt culled from available EIT data, but this is really intended to allow viewers to see what's on right now or in the immediate future without resorting to channel flipping. I bought a Sharp Aquos one generation before this feature became standard, so I missed out, but I really don't feel like I'm missing too much because of the described limitations.
Badass Resumes
Unlike printed guides, which have to limit show descriptions to one or two lines at best, digital guides can be as detailed as you wish. By providing your own RSS feed of your schedule, you could increase the information given, which should increase the number of people willing to watch your channel. Even though I have a DVR I still watch (interesting) commercials, so don't completely write off my viewership.
And here's how you can directly make money:
By providing your own guide information, you can insert sponsorship lines and charge for them.
"Tonight on Lost, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Jack and Kate have more awkward sexual tension, while Hurley tries to cheer everyone up, Sawyer acts rudely, and Sayid kills someone with his feet."
Even us DVR users will very often look at the guide information. Voila, you've just sold an ad!
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Thank you for being the first to thank them.
It sucks that it' shutting down (I use it for GB-PVR)- but they did do it for free for years. Let's not demonize them, no matter the reason, and start looking for alternatives.
Get your Unix fortune now!
MythTV doesn't fast forward, it does commercial skip. Automatically. It hits a commercial break and just jumps past.
Tivo used to allow a really nice FF feature to skip commercials. Now they overlay advertisements on top of the advertisements you are fast forwarding through. Not to mention the advertising in the rest of the UI. If you own one, you should know what I'm talking about. If not, Google found me someone's blog with pictures