[mythtv-users] We don't need no stinking surveys!

[Craig Rindy]

Hey, Dan, you know what another neato part of capitalism is?  A:  Competition.

As long as a little concept called advertisement still produces a profit, there will be free-beer search engines, free-beer web mail, free-beer television listings, free-beer site hosting, etc.  If zappy (or some mother corporation or illegal consortium of all providers) has a monopoly on television listings and feel like dicks, they could easily now douche most myth users into paying a fee.  I don't think that will happen because (some of this has been mentioned by others):

1.  Screen-scraping is back in vogue if the web site is advertise-based and no cost to the user.
2.  If pay service, then competition has one less competitor in the advertisement-revenue tv listing web site market.
3.  Worst case scenario:  listing monopoly means one has to pay to receive listings in any fashion, spurring (possibly illegal) grassroots methods of retrieving or producing listings.

None of these are desirable to the provider.  Bottom line is that I don't think they have a monopoly on listings, and I don't think advertisement-revenue sites are going away any time soon.  It's in their best interest to keep the current services, minimal bandwidth requirements, and increasing revenue stream with each Internet user that gets introduced to the site.

Can anyone confirm that zap2it and the listing provider(s) for DirecTV, Cox, TiVo, Qwest, Dish, etc. are not owned by the same parent company or have exclusive deals?

Personal apologies to Dan for the tone in the first couple of paragraphs.  But when one uses sentences like "It's called capitalism.", one tends to rub people the wrong way.  I try not to draw first blood with the kind of tone that you had on the soapbox replying to Tony's comment (which BTW seems to have nothing to do with capitalism and zap2it's rights (which should be apparent), only with his demands as a MythTV user, not a zap2it patron).

Dan Morphis wrote:
> Chris Petersen wrote:
> 
>> > My concern is once they get us all hooked, in a year or two they
>> > slap on a monthly fee. You can see it coming...
> 
> I can see where your comming from, but you seem to think that they 
> should provide you with something for free.  The dot bomb days are 
> over.  If they want/need to charge a fee to make this all happen, they 
> are well within their right.  It's called capitalism.  They have 
> something we want, we pay them, they give it to us.  Right now, our 
> "payment" is in the form of fillingout a survey. </soapbox>
> 
>>
>>
>>  And risk all of us going back to screen scraping? It's unlikely.
>>  We're too small of a group to produce much profit, and the diminished
>>  bandwidth costs from no more screen scraping, along with the data
>>  they will gather from future surveys, far outweighs what profit they
>>  might make.
> 
> 
> I concur.
> 
> -dan
>