[mythtv-users] Zap2it Labs Shutting Down?

Tom Metro tmetro+mythtv-users at gmail.com
Thu Jun 21 02:41:54 UTC 2007


William Munson wrote:
> Does not surprise me in the least. It costs them big $$ to purchase the 
> info and we pirate the info...

Purchase? It's the other way around. TMS charges broadcasters $75 per 
channel per month to carry their data. (I looked into this recently for 
a community access station.) And of course they charge their licensees, 
like most of the newspapers in the US. I'm sure that's where the 
majority of the revenue comes from, and the $75/month fee just covers 
administration costs.


Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
> Another option is to get the data directly from the stations
> themselves...

If you could just convince every station to publish its listings on its 
web site in some RSS-sub format (or scrape and republish), you could 
then use existing infrastructure for caching and redistributing RSS 
feeds to provide aggregated listings.


> Some serious people are talking about licensing the data from
> TMS, but this will take a little time to work out. We have no
> idea of the number of MythTV users that use DataDirect listings...

As others have pointed out, TMS should be able to share that information 
with a potential licensor. Of course the number willing to pay a 
subscription fee will be less.


> ...nor how much TMS charges for commercial access to their data
> stream.

I have some notes from 2003 when I looked into licensing listing data 
for a project. They price it by market. $500/month per market. 
$8000/month for the top-25 markets. $12,000/month minimum purchase. I 
don't know what it costs to license all markets. (Someone else posted 
that the $12K covers it.) Looks like their is also a $0.03 per user 
royalty. (I assume that's per month.)

It sounds like the project leads are in contact with TMS and should have 
accurate numbers shortly.

Just as a rough calculation, if the data and hosting costs could be had 
for $20K month, and a $50/year fee was charged to subscribers, you'd 
need 4800 subscribers to break even.

As it has been suggested, maybe we should start a MythTV non-profit with 
the sole purpose of redistributing the data and billing members (much of 
the billing could be outsourced to PayPal, which can handle 
subscriptions). It'd have to pull in enough cash to pay for a part time 
administrator and probably a part time accountant, plus of course 
bandwidth and hosting services.


Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> But let's suppose somebody does set up an amicable (to both TMS and
> subscriber base) agreement to collect subscriber fees and pay TMS.
> What's to stop the same abuse that is going on currently from
> continuing?

I don't quite get that argument, if redistribution is what they are 
concerned with. If that was the case, it would still be far cheaper for 
abusers to get a Snapstream or Sage subscription to regain access to the 
data stream.

Someone pointed out that the abuse was from commercial products being 
designed to use the free service and end-users of that product using the 
free data feed. Collecting a license fee from an organization that 
redistributes only to paying subscribes closes that loophole.


Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Mickey Chandler wrote:
>> ...all of those multiple sources ultimately get their data from TMS 
>> anyway.
> 
> Um... who does *TMS* get it from?
> Multiple sources?

TMS gets their data directly from the broadcasters using a rather 
manual, and in my opinion antiquated, process (as it was described to me 
by one of their sales people).

  -Tom


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