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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.
So you're saying Zap2It stopped offering their free service because not enough people were using it?
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).
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....
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.
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