[mythtv-users] Any way to pay?

[Rod Smith]

On Thursday 05 July 2007 13:39, Carl Reynolds wrote:
> Tim Schall wrote:
> > Hi Carl:
>  > <snip...>
> >
> > One station down, how many are left?
> >
> > Tim
>
> Thanks Tim,
>
> That was very informative. I think your last statement high lights the
> problem we are having. It's my understanding that there about 6800
> stations in the US

I don't think it's quite THAT bad. I recall earlier there was a figure 
somewhere in that vicinity for the number of registered TV-band transmitters 
in the US, but the number of stations carrying programs we actually care 
about is smaller. There are 210 DMAs (television markets) in the United 
States:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_stations_in_North_America_by_media_market

Most of these have fewer than a dozen broadcast stations; the 6800 (or 
whatever it is) figure includes transmitters that don't carry unique 
programming. Based on the 210-DMA figure, I'd estimate that the total number 
we'd need to be concerned about is probably between 1,500 and 3,000, although 
this is just an estimate.

> and from what I gather, this will still not help us 
> with the dozen or so Cable and Satellite providers that each have a
> different schedule covering each region.

There are two issues here: National (cable/satellite) stations and the 
collections of those stations (lineups) carried by individual operators. Most 
individual national stations are carried on multiple providers -- Comcast 
Cable, Cox Cable, DirecTV, etc., all carry such staples as CNN and TNT. The 
CNN feed carried by Comcast is the same as the one carried by DirecTV. (Note 
an exception below, though.) Once you've got the listings for those channels, 
it's relatively easy to link them to channel numbers for the lineups of 
individual carriers or markets, and those linkages don't change all that 
often. (To be sure, they DO change occasionally, and creating a lineup isn't 
a zero-effort proposition; but compared to actually updating the data on 
actual broadcast schedules on a day-to-day basis, the amount of work is 
minor.)

There are, of course, a few more extra channels and complications, such as 
local cable-only channels and cases in which a cable operator combines two 
channels, using one frequency to deliver one station during certain hours and 
a second station during other hours. Such cases would probably require unique 
channel identifications. There are also east and west coast feeds of some 
channels, which again would have to be listed as distinct channels.

Overall, I'd say there are probably 3,000 to 5,000 stations whose data might 
need to be delivered, most of those being local broadcast and cable community 
access stations. Granted, that's not orders of magnitude less than the 6,800 
number you mention, but it is a smaller number, and my estimate includes all 
the national channels. The different lineups carried by different cable 
providers add to the work, but they don't multiply it.

> While it's good to know that you want to help, and we may need to
> re-visit this method in the future, I hope there is a more centralized
> way of getting this information to all the US users. Using the program
> feed from each provider directly in MythTV would get to be a bit of a
> maintenance nightmare.

Hypothetically, if every station would make the data available in some 
standardized way, it would be fairly easy from the MythTV user's point of 
view -- you'd just need to configure your system to look to certain Web 
sites, P2P sites, Usenet newsgroups, or whatever. Of course, this is a 
pipe-dream sort of hypothetical; I expect it would be an uphill battle, 
possibly of Sisyphean proportions, to get every station to provide data in 
such a way.

A more likely scenario would involve collating data from a handful of sources 
(direct from TV stations, by scraping TV stations' or satellite/cable 
providers' Web sites, from third-party TV listings, etc.), massaging it into 
a common format, and redistributing it. This would be manageable even for a 
relatively small operation, but there are important legal questions, 
particularly when it comes to program descriptions rather than purely factual 
data (for instance, that "Green Acres" is being shown at 3:00 on channel 47).

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com