[mythtv-users] XMLTV is Broken in North America

Jason Cooper jcooper at nevernight.net
Tue Jul 1 06:28:11 EDT 2003


Mark Blair (mark at cfug.com) wrote:
> 
> More to the point maybe its time to evaluate a longer term solution to
> providing sustainable high quality xml tv feeds globally.
> 
> I've been thinking a lot about this as I've struggled over the past week to
> keep up with the Australian based listings sites.  To the point I think one
> of the Australian listing providers actually has code in their listings site
> that formats pages differently every single request to try and prevent _any_
> sucking of their data.
> 
> The only solution I have come up with so far is to build a web based
> collaborative tv listings site that people can actively update for other
> good people to share. Therefore sharing the effort of maintaining our own tv
> listings worldwide. It wouldn't be _too_ hard to build such a system that
> allowed this then spat the stuff out in xml format. My questions is if I
> build it will people come and contribute listings ... think of it as the "tv
> listing borg collective"
> 
> thoughts?
> Mark

Perhaps some sort of p2p thing?  eg. During setup, you give your zip
code, it polls the net, and says something like "Users in your area with
xyz cable provider say they have these channels."  You edit it to your
correct listings, and it becomes part of the database.  

Listings retrieval might be best pulled from individual channel sites.
each household pulls down one channel (discovery's listings should be
the same across the country, right?) and shares the listings... The big
advantage to this being fewer hits to each listing sight, which in turn
means staying below the radar.

Don't know how feasable it is, just thought I would toss the idea out there.

Cooper.


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