[mythtv] Listings concept idea

Billy Macdonald billymacdonald at gmail.com
Thu Jul 5 17:55:31 UTC 2007


On 7/4/07, Trevor Wagner <fritzed at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/4/07, Michael George <mgeorge3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Indeed. Most (all?) of the tv listing sites stay up due to ad revenue
> > and screenscraping removes the ability for them to get that revenue.
> > Setting up a central server to do it would setup a nice legal target
> > that can be proven to be removing revenue by breaking their usage
> > agreements and/or copyright restrictions (
> > http://www.tvguide.com/services/Terms.aspx for an
> example, "Except for
> > that information which is in the public domain or for which you have
> > been given written permission by TV Guide or the copyright owner, you
> > may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, distribute, perform, display,
> > participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in
> > any way exploit the content of tvguide.com or any portion thereof." )
> >
>
> The idea of screen scraping individual channel sites has been
> discussed.  This would most likely avoid legal issues from scraping
> something like tvguide.com.  One of the problems with this idea is the
> frequency of updates when scraping so many various sources.  Using a
> central server to do the scraping would help with this issue because
> only the server's scraper would need to be updated to match.
> _______________________________________________

I don't know about you guys and you're local channels, by my cable
provider's web listings are provided by zap2it, my local affiliates
(KOLD, KGUN, KVOA, KMSB) all use TitanTV.  Only the local PBS station
has the listings on their site and not hosted by someone else.

So any issues with scraping titanTV or zap2it directly would be the
same in many situations scraping the local stations and cable
companies.

What I'm curious about is that when I bought my PVR250 tuners they all
included access to subscription data from someone for their scheduling
in their Windows software.  The way I see it, I've paid for this
access 5 times now (cards break sometimes).  Has anyone looked into
getting access to the data from places that we've already paid to get
access from?


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