[mythtv-users] XMLTV says hi...

Robert Eden rmeden at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 20 19:58:02 UTC 2007


My name is Robert Eden and I wrote the DD grabber for XMLTV.

Of course XMLTV is in the same boat.  I would love to help Daniel and 
Issac with this as it's not a MythTV issue, it effects many  U.S./Canada 
open source projects (not just PVRs).

A scraper would work for my needs, but you PVR folks would lose lots of 
important info (episode number, cast, synopsis, etc).  When scrapers 
were used, the Open Source PVR community was *much* smaller and the 
demands on Zap2IT.com from scraping were so bad they kicked off the Data 
Direct project.  At the size of the customer base now, I'm sure there 
would be a major cat and mouse game to keep a scraper working.

At the 12k/mo number previously posted for U.S. listings (which is in 
line with old discussions I've had with Zap2IT) would require 7200 folks 
paying $20/year to just pay for the listings.  That doesn't take into 
account, servers, bandwidth, legal (yes, lots of legal issues), and of 
course personnel.  While there *may* be a solution, it's not a simple 
one and getting something up by 9/1 will be a challenge.

There are only two providers of TV listing in the U.S.  Tribune and TV 
Guide. As you've seen, they charge a pretty penny for the data.  I can 
see their concern about commercial entities using the DD service instead 
of paying them for listings.  If a new service is created, there will 
have to be ways to prevent commercial entities from accessing the 
data.   I can see a charge of like $20/year/lineup, with tracking by IP 
address to prevent excessive accesses.  Of course that won't prevent the 
"bad guys" from grabbing the data and redistributing it via their own 
servers, but that's a copyright issue w/o a simple solution.  Hopefully 
by restricting  the number of lineups per CC or paypal account will 
cause too much trouble for them to redistribute data.  Without an 
"illegal redistribution" solution, I can see a problem even getting 
redistribution rights.

Daniel and Isaac, please bring me in to help come up with a solution. 
(out of band I imagine).

Robert





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