[mythtv-users] Supporting schedulesdirect.org

[Jeff Simpson]

> ... And like I said, as
> it relates to Schedules Direct, no one will need to create a PayPal
> account to sign up.

hrrm? I must have missed this nugget of information somewhere.
schedulesdirect.org says "Membership dues will be billed through
PayPal". Is there some other source of information we should be
referring to? (Well, obviously you are the horses mouth when it comes
to that sort of thing, but is there some collection of information
like that that I can get without reading 1000 mailinglist emails of
people whining?)

My thoughts:

The original problem, as I understand it, is that people were either
using Zap2It service to support their commercial products, or people
were re-distributing the data they downloaded, which they are not
licensed to do. So question 1:

 - How does schedules direct solve that? It seems like paying $X/month
for an account won't prevent people from re-distributing the data
illegally. In fact...

- Apart from the terms of agreement, what prevents a user from signing
up for an account, downloading the data every day, and allowing others
to get the data from him for free?

- Are accounts per-machine, per-household, or something else? What
prevents me from pooling together a few thousand of my close friends
on mythtv-users to get one account?

- Since labs.Zap2It and MythTV were both free services, anything that
went wrong was considered just another expected glitch in the free
software world. If schedulesdirect is going to be a paid service,
expectations are going up. What kind of customer service, reliability
and data quality should we expect for our payment?

- Obviously it is in mythTV's best interest to have a working
schedule-grabber for north America, but is schedulesdirect going to
have a completely separate tech support mailinglist/forum, or will it
just be part of mythTV like labs.zap2it was? Since it's a commercial
service, is it fair to rely on the community for tech support needs,
or is it really a non-profit sort of service provider?

The biggest thing I'm worried about is being undercut by TIVO. The
draw of mythTV is flexibility and cost. If the schedulesdirect fees
end up being the same or MORE expensive than a Tivo fee, I expect that
I and many others will be switching to tivo.

When are we going to have a working system to test with? We're only a
few weeks from the blackout date, and it would be nice to have some
parallel systems in place so that we can make sure everything is
working before "going live".

 -Jeff