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MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing
An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."
Wait, what? I thought the advertisers were the television networks' customers.
That's right, it's what you pay for your TiVo.
But:
* Not everybody has access to the services TiVo provides (they're not operating world-wide, and alternatives at least around here (in Switzerland) are nowhere near $5/mo, but are bundled with digital TV)
* Some people prefer an open-source alternative, not only to the PVR itself, but also for the data source
* Screen scraping works. Sort of. Sometimes. As soon as your scraper gets popular, the web site will change its layout to foil scraping attempts, and you can start new. It's an arms race, unfortunately, and there's no real way out of it. The networks and content providers jealously guard their data, and only license it to redistributors.
* Schedules Direct is such a licensing partner. Instead of distributing the data in proprietary format, they use standard XML. That is good.
and, most important of all:
* If you had read TFA (or even the freaking post), they're aiming to drop the price. For now, they have no idea how popular their service will be, but want to make sure they don't create a financial sinkhole. The folks behind this are from the MythTV and XMLTV community, and I'd be surprised if they see this as a get rich quick scheme. They're too realistic for that.