[mythtv-users] Alternatives to Supporting schedulesdirect.org

[Robert Current]

On 8/7/07, William Munson <william_munson at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> So please remember that Mythtv is free software and does not come
> with the promise of usability.

Is that sarcasm?  Condescending?  Did you get offended somehow?  I'm
not trying to start a fight.

Seriously, I'm looking for information and suggestions and ideas, what
people (any, commercial, private, OSS projects) are planning in the
future (for services).  I never asked for promises.

But this was intended to be a question about guide data, which is
potential a service that might require payment.  When it comes to the
point where paying money for something is required, a lot of people
are going to expect some promises be made by a provider.

> Schedulesdirect is providing a service to make
> life easy for us who just want to use the thing and not have to update
> the scrapper every 2 weeks because the web site changed to combat the
> cost of the scrapers abuse. I have been around long enough to remember
> the days of scraping web sites for listing data, good data is worth
> something to me.

Sounds like you might want to just bite the bullet and pay for a TiVo.

Quite a rant there, but it's not convincing me schedulesdirect is the
only solution.  If some commercial company like TitanTV came along and
worked, I'd still consider it.  Once I believe there was a discussion
(on their now closed forum) about offering MythTV and FreeVo data for
something like $16/year.

To be honest, I don't see why some for-profit company (like TitanTV,
or even TV Guide for that matter) might not step up and offer
something usable.  If that happened, I'd be more than happy to pay for
whatever service I personally found to have the best data per dollar
for my specific usage.

For now, I'd like to keep my options open until I know the full story
on ALL possible solutions and cost.

Actually, in the end, odds are there will be enough EIT data out there
that this will all become totally irreverent anyway.  And, if my cable
company started pumping out EIT, or there was a slick interface to
pull EIT through a DishNetwork or DirecTV tuner, I'd probably pay for
that service, and live with it.