[mythtv-users] Let's get our heads straight here on listings solutions

Mattias Holmlund mattias.holmlund at gmail.com
Fri Jun 22 20:11:06 UTC 2007


On 6/22/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 08:30:34PM +0200, Mattias Holmlund wrote:
> > Let me give you some perspective from Sweden. I run the tv.swedb.se
> > backend that provides listings for MythTV users in Sweden via xmltv.
> > We have contracts with all major tv-stations in Sweden (currently 13)
> > which gives us access to TV-listings via their press-services. I
> > aggregate this data and publish it in xmltv-format.
> >
> > The format and quality of this data varies wildly. Some provide data
> > in CSV-format. Some in html. A few in XML. But the most common format
> > is Microsoft Word. Someone at the TV-station manually types their
> > schedule into Microsoft Word and sends it out via e-mail!
>
> Someone suggested that this is very manual in the US as well.  Dot eh
> Swedish broadcasters not use playout automation yet?

Yes they do. But that doesn't mean that they actually have
descriptions in their playout systems or that they can export listings
data from them. I have only come into actual contact with the playout
system with one TV-station. They exported xml-files from their playout
system that we could use. Great! But after a few weeks we started
noticing that the xml-files did not contain late updates to the
listings. It turned out that one week before the actual day air-date,
they started adding commercials to their playout system. And at that
time, they stopped exporting the xml-files, because otherwise the
xml-files would contain information about the commercials. So we had
to resort to using their MS Word files anyway, since they were the
only listings source that was properly updated...

/Mattias

-- 
Mattias Holmlund
http://www.holmlund.se/mattias/


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