Slashdot Mirror
No More TV Listings For MythTV Users
Ryan Brown writes "As of September 1, the free XML TV guide service at zap2it labs has shut its doors due to misuse issues, as well as internal business issues. Now that Linux users, and most PVR users for that matter, are nearing the end of their last fetched TV guide, what free alternatives exist that can replace this much-needed service?"
What's wrong with paying a couple bucks to get the listing data? Someone somewhere had to pay to provide the service. I don't see why everything, everywhere has to be free, free, free.
Oh damnit - I forgot. This is slashdot. Paying for stuff = bad.
Why wouldnt the TV stations provide this for free - it is the ultimate free advertising pushed straight to the customer.
Instead they treat the listings like corporate bloody secrets - would you PAY to get junk mail posted to your letterbox?
1. Locate each TV channel's listings webpage,
2. Write up a bash script full of wget calls and parse all that incoming HTML with awk,
3. ????
4. Profit!!
So you're saying Zap2It stopped offering their free service because not enough people were using it?
Terms of service? Fuck terms of service. Using a PVR at all is probably against someone's terms of service. The NFL for example.
This space available.
Local broadcasters already submit them to a central authority.... well... self proclaimed central authority. (that's another rant for another time). Many broadcasters already provide their listings on the web as well.
;)
The national stuff is easy as they already have to send their schedules to many local broadcasters and cable co. Format access can be as easy as an ftp, http or email. Up until recently buena vista had a lovely dial-a-fax option to send a show format to your desired fax line.
There are essentially two ways to automate this process. Propose an information exchange standard for all to follow. In a show listing you can merely tag it with the episode number and that can be used to retrieve the show description from a database. The big guys don't want this as there is already a huge industry around guide data.
Broadcasters provide the skeleton schedule and the central db fills in the meat.
As an exchange of benefit, make this guide data available for the broadcaster. Create tools to manage the data, export and whatnot. (Trust me, you'll save them several thousand dollars if they are purchasing the service from tribune for ATSC EPG data)
If you need to fund the op, at a reduced rate you can sale the guide data to cable ops and third party application designers.
The system in place is a great deal more manual then one would believe. A little work to integrate this whole process with their respect schedule managers would go over well with pretty much everybody.
I always toyed with the idea, but it's really a lot of hassle. I suppose I probably should have started my own guide data company a while ago. Oh well
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
have you ever used a DVR ? do you have any idea how fscking awesome they are ? imagine watching just the content you want, when you want. NGC and DSC channels are loaded with educational TV shows. Do you know how powerful this is when you have a child ? Its the perfect "filter" . My kids dont watch unsupervised trash tv. They watch educational shows when I want them to, without trashy commericals. you really have no clue WTF you are talking about. a home built PVR is a responsible parents godsend. and dont tell me you are here today on slashdot during the one day out of the year you come in from wandering the desert. give me a fscking break already.
Does this really surprise anyone?
I dabbled with MythTV a few years ago. I was quite surprised then that the Zap2It service was free, and I'm quite amazed it lasted as long as it did. At a certain point, if MythTV got bigger, they would have HAD to do this.
Now other posters have pointed out that ReplayTV in some countries used this, and some companies were taking these listings and reselling them for profit.
If you want to be open source, this data has to come from somewhere. Maybe someone will write scripts to scrape Yahoo TV or TV Guide or something else. If you just move to another guide service, they will end up dong the same thing. Maybe they'll put ads in it (and we all know how well putting ads all though things fares with /.ers).
So I say... ha. I've been expecting this. It was inevitable. Meanwhile I've had a TiVo for maybe 3 years now. I love it. I now have a Series 3. And I've said that I love it in /. discussions and there are always those people who say "But MythTV is free!" I realize there are benefits to the MythTV way (multiple front ends, multiple media formats, etc). But now the free guide data is gone. You could pay someone for it (or Zap2It). But if your setup isn't that complex, wouldn't a TiVo fit the bill? It may cost a hair more, but they won't pull guide data on you. Plus for that small monthly fee you get software updates and suggestions (which is very valuable to me).
Free ride, in this small case, is over. I hope people enjoyed it, but at some level people had to see this would happen.
Too bad though. As I remember, they had excellent quality data.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is one of the reasons why I opted to go Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 when I built out my PVR earlier this month.
There are more pragmatic reasons too--multiple F/OSS projects are collaborating on providing SD & even more will be encouraging their users to get their listings from SD.They can want whatever they wish! But they aren't going to get it soon. Only two companies compile guide data & they sell it to other businesses. Some of these businesses (like SD) charge at least enough to pay for what it costs them to provide the listings. Others put it on the web & use ads to pay for it. Payment must come from somewhere. Z2It was free because they were a subsidary of Tribune.
If the data comes from one of the two "mother" listings, it will cost money. Period. No one will give you a free lunch. (Or you can violate TOS by scraping it.)
If it doesn't come from these "mother" sources, someone would have to form a third listing generation service (but this would cost significant setup & operating $$$ that they'd want to pass on).
You do realize that most civil actions are entirely about who has the larger legal budget & most are settled out of court?
I agree that a suit would be stupid, but look in the news. I fully expect to see some BS case about DMCA circumvention and/or data theft and/or disrupiton of service, etc. against any centralized project to try this.
If a suit wasn't realistic, nobody would buy data from these people--ReplayTV & MythTV & TiVo engineers could certainly scrape a webpage!
They're perhaps less likely to prosecute individuals, but either this small group of abusers wouldn't disrupt their service or the providers would change their page layout often enough to lower the number of abusers to manageable levels.
...and offer PVR friendly listing feeds for something along the lines of $2 or $3 a month or so.
I understand you believe the GP's suggestion to be unethical, but there's no need to misuse the word "theft" for this. What the GP is talking about may be freeloading, or copyright violation, or breach of contract, but to call this "theft" belittles the victims of actual theft.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Wow, they're not exactly marketing geniuses are they? Announce plans to make a very large discount on you service as soon as enough people sign up at the original inflated price? Yeah, that'll pull a huge number of customers in at your launch.
That's because they're not trying to make a profit, and they're just passing on the reality that they'll have to have a sizable subscriber base in order to defray their fixed costs enough to reduce the fee. They expect that their target audience will understand these issues. Not only that, but both prices are low enough that the costs aren't going to be an issue for their target market.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Until a new distribution model for the listing is devised, services like labs.zap2it.com are going to spring up, then close down due to the cost of running a bunch of servers. It's hard to monetize the data with adds, since the data in interpreted by MythTV/ReplayTV/whatever.
Several posters have mentioned that they have programs that scrape data off of web pages. IIRC, this is the original method used by MythTV. When the load becomes great on the pages that are being scraped, those pages will change or go away.
We need to agree on a standard (ala Bittorent) for distributing this type of static content among the users. Each MythTV user can spare some bandwidth late at night to seed others. Assuming that the cable and television companies allow it to succeed....
In that case, I rescind my insult. Strep throat is no joke...I've had it twice and wanted to die both times.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Because it costs money to get them, assemble them, and distribute them.
Linux is free because a bunch of volunteers put it together for free. So why aren't you volunteering to call up numerous TV networks, every few days, to get a list of their schedule, and input that into a public database for others to use, for free?
How about calling up every cable network in the country every month, to see if they've made any changes to their channel line-ups? And checking on every FCC action to see if broadcast TV channels have made any changes.
Somebody needs to do it. In absence of a huge and sustained mass of unimaginably dedicated volunteers, somebody needs to get paid for doing the hard and thankless work. Otherwise, you're just being a leech.
Zap2It was being charitable, nothing more. It was costing them money, but they put up with it for quite a while anyhow. No one else has, nor will do so again. There's just no profit in it, and it's not sustainable.
I'm sure you can think of many other examples of some software or service that started out free, but was merely a loss-leader or other marketing ploy, before it went commercial.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Schedulesdirect charges the same rate that zap2it is planning to charge. so why should peope switch to them?