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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."
I'd be willing to pay to get a machine-readable schedule of shows. But I'd certainly be willing to pay more for a machine-readable record of exactly when the commercials were.
Not that that's likely to happen any time soon.
So you pay for satellite or cable TV, but the television networks are un-willing to provide a few bytes of information in the form of scheduling information for future programming? I mean, do they want people to pay for their content and watch advertisements or not? $5/month for the few kb worth of data you receive is ridiculous as far as I'm concerned. The TV networks should just get together and standardize on some television scheduling format and release the data themselves.
After all, it would be in the best interests of their customers, the viewers.
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Whilst a pay service might work well the fact is that site scraping can be very effective and provide very good results.
Australian users have never really had guide data available to them, so we have basically relied on either IceTV, a (very well done) for-pay data source, or ozTivo. Recently Australian users have had a new resource, Shepherd.
Shepherd is basically a bunch of scripts that are automatically updated and designed to read quite a few websites and data sources (including IceTV and ozTivo) and provides the best quality data I've seen so far. The set up is relatively easy, if you can get MythTv set up you can certainly get Shepherd set up, and doesn't require ongoing maintenance, once you get it working the script will keep itself up to date.
The TLDR version: Site Scraping can and does work well.
But before you do, let me just fill you in on how the Australian experience went, and why paying may not be such a bad thing.
Historically, there's been no XMLTV guide data source for Australians. So there have been a litany of screen scrapers that downloaded guide web pages, massaged them into XMLTV format, and passed them on to MythTV and friends.
The only problem is, the program guides are controlled by the TV networks, and the TV networks hate us. Ouch, but true. They've made the leap of logic that, if we had program guide data on our DVRs, we can skip the commercials.[2] So they've been arguing that they own the copyright to the guide data[3] and any unauthorised use of it (i.e. screen scraping) is a breach of their terms.
The only commercial company to publish guide data for DVRs is IceTV and they've been a lawsuit magnet from abovementioned TV networks. Not many people would pay a monthly subscription to something that could be killed at any time.
Meanwhile, in screen scraping land, it's been a game of cat-and-mouse. Find a web site that publishes guide data. Write a screen scraper (or wait for someone else to). In a few months, notice that nothing's been scheduled for a few days - the screen scraper has broken because they've (intentionally) changed the format to deter this. Find another web site. Repeat.
They did all sorts of things to deter us. Obfuscation through JavaScript. Only allowing n page views per hour. After they converted all the guide details to GIFs, we gave up. Most people have moved to IceTV or ozTiVo.
The ozTiVo guide is an interesting idea. It's essentially a wiki that people manually fill in with guide data. Then you can use its XMLTV interface to get guide data out. You're reliant on other people to fill it in, and (due to above copyright issue in Australia) a lot of program details are generic or omitted. But it's workable. This is a model which other people may be interested in setting up.
Fortunately for IceTV, in the last few days, it won its court case and is now happily legit.
So, to sum up, we in Australia are actually happy to pay for quality guide data. Because we know the alternatives. If someone wants to set up a screen scraper, good luck to you - we fought the good fight and lost, but maybe you won't.
--
[1] Ladies too!
[2] No, I don't know how they came up with that either.
[3] In Australia, this has historically been a grey area.
Well, with an open system you can do extra stuff. You could set up a web frontend where you can schedule your service. You could have your box email or sms you if it finds something you may like (and respond if you wish to record it). I'm sure there's many other things that I haven't even thought of that are available on an open system (or if your closed system company decides to allow you to do this via their implimentation).
And if it brakes they give me a new one.
Naw, if it brakes you should probably take it to Meineke...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I finally gave up on MythTV. Just never worked quite right. I bought a ReplayTV 3000 (similar to tivo) used for $10, popped a 80gig i had lying around, downloaded the replay TV software to the new hard drive and booted it up. Works great and the wife loves it. To download the TV shows it hooks into the phone line, in this case Vonage and dials up a local number to download the show info / tvguide. All the replay 1000, 2000, and 3000 devices all have a lifetime subscription. When I got it running,, the messagges inbox had mail from 1999 the lasttime it was used so im not worried about replaytv shutting me off. If they did, i paid $10 for the unit. Big whoop. MythFV was fun, but this old unit always works,, gets free lisitings and i dont have to mess with the software.
If you're willing to use a Windows box for DVR, I'll eagerly suggest BeyondTV.
I had tried all the free alternatives -- MythTV, GB-PVR, Mediaportal... none of them were particularly friendly to work with or stable, for that matter. And what good is a DVR if it crashes before it can record your shows??
IMO, the Zap2ItLabs discontinuation was one of the best sales pitches for BeyondTV. One-time software purchase, and no subscription fees. It works flawlessly with my HDHomeRun dual tuner (also highly recommended), and even came with a "free" RF remote (looks like they're still running that special at snapstream.com).
Yeah, there's no capturing encrypted signals, but I have the MOST basic cable package anyway, just to get all the major networks, plus Discovery & a few others.
Many folks (even Comcast's cable monkeys) don't realize that the cableco's must (according to FCC) transmit the rock-bottom basic cable package *in the clear* (so no special cable box is needed); you get this digital signal when you order the most basic analog package. So for 18 bucks a month, I can receive/record all the major network digital HD goodness I can stand, with commercial skipping in BeyondTV. Place shifting? No problem. It's my MPEG2 file...
My one little way of giving the Finger To The Man.
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
I really do hope this succeeds.
My biggest problem with the MythTV route was reliable scheduling information. I don't want to have to bother with the tedium of tweaking screen scraper scripts every other day. I gave up on the homemade TV box a long time ago and went with a TiVo. I bought in on one of their deals that with a three year commitment, the box was free. I like the TiVo method...tell it which programs I want at the start of the season, and then I can forget about it.
If there were a *reliable* alternative for scheduling information that I didn't have to tweak every time I turned around, even if there is a fee, I'd be tempted to try MythTV again.
But until then, my TiVo is my best friend.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Here in the UK we don't have any of these problems of TV listing availability and complicated html parsing scripts which break every week. The BBC have a special web page just for XMLTV downloads, and it doesn't just cover BBC channels, but practically every channel you can receive in the UK (check the channels.dat file for a full list). The only restriction is that the data can only be used for private non-commercial purposes.
Of course, most of this is probably being paid for from our TV license fees which I know many Americans regard as being a terrible communist plot (some funding may come from the cover price of the Radio Times magazine).
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.
I'll sign up for the $15. Their announcement was honest and direct. They expect a $20 a year cost but they need to "over-charge" the first quarter to help guarantee coverage of their start-up costs. I understand that. I've started a business before. It's a gamble. It's a gamble for me too to support them.
For me, it's only $15 to "see what will happen" and to support the community. If the cost drops to $20 a year like they anticipate I'll gladly pay a reliable data feed. 5 cents a day to "stick-it" to the cable companies and the advertisers and at the same time supporting the OSS community? It's a no brainer.
If the costs stay at $5 a month then I'll need to re-think my cable needs. But still, if I'm going to pay $5 for Tivo with commercials, why not $5 for MythTV without commercials? Either way, I'll pay the $15 to get started and to see what happens. I've spent that much buying a friend and I coffee at Starbucks. I'll continue to support them if the cost drops to $20 a year. That's cheep for the return I'm getting.
-[d]-
I've been interested in this whole TV-on-the-PC scene since I first witnessed it on one of those infamous Toshiba desktops. It was cool back then, and it is still cool today.
I used Media Center for about two years, and basically loved it. I purchased the extender for my Xbox and enjoyed that too. During this time I was watching Myth and hoping it would come along and improve the experience. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get it to run. It didn't like me, and I didn't particularly think much of it. We needed counseling...
A friend of mine tipped me off to Ubuntu at about the 6.06 point. I was a die-hard RedHat fan, still pining for the days before Fedora was born, when things were simple, etc. Switching off of my bastard children of CentOS and Fedora was not looking too likely. Until that is I used Synaptec to install MythTV. It 'just worked'. Seriously. I've tweaked and tweaked and tweaked it since then, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't any more or less difficult for me than MCE was.
The features that I'd miss from Myth, were I to switch are:
1) Different sources have different schedules. I have ONE cable box, and a dedicated tuner just for The channels lower than 74 are captured by a separate dual-tuner card. This way the wife gets her movies, and the kids still get Spongebob and Pokemon. I get to have my cake and eat it too.
2) Choice of endpoints. I can watch Myth content via the web (with a flash-mod to Mythweb), on my Ubuntu partition of my laptop as a frontend, on my Windows stuff with the MythTV player, and probably in a lot of ways I haven't thought of yet. There's no vendor standing there telling me 'no', and I love it.
3) Freedom in general. I didn't like Myth's built-in-DVD player, so I use an external player. No one cared. No hacking was required. I just changed it. Likewise, I didn't want to stream gigabytes across the tubes, so I modified Mythweb to convert to flash videos instead. Much smaller and easier on the pipe-joints. I have a myriad of other choices waiting my preference should the default not fit my needs anymore. I LOVE that.
4) Commercial skip. Annoying at times, but generally super pleasant. If you've been watching Fox lately, you might be aware that there's a Simpson's Movie in theaters. That is, if you've been watching Fox's commercial space it was likely tattooed on your eyelids. I back-spaced into one once to see the trailer and was shocked. That stuff was absolutely pervasive! I thought it was a nice testament to Myth that I mostly didn't have to endure that particular media blitz. And that's just that one show...
5) Love. Myth to me still seems young. It reminds me of my kids. In that way, I feel like I'm watching a teenager enroll for his freshman year in High School. I'm a proud papa of my Myth solution at this point, and don't want to see it die or fade into obscurity.
So yeah, I'll pay it. I'd love to see it go down, as it used to be free, but I understand that things with value are often exchanged for cash. Services included. And that's okay...
I figure it's the same way in this case. The information is perfectly free. What you are paying for is having the information assembled and presented in a way that you can use easily. You can always do the same yourself, but what's cheaper? Your time on a regular basis or $5 a month...