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

David Lonie loniedavid at gmail.com
Fri Jun 22 20:23:32 UTC 2007


On Friday 22 June 2007 Various MythTV Fans wrote:
> Recent suggestions that we begin a modern day version of a 'letter writing
> campaign" to all of the TV stations in the world to get listings posted for
> free is just patently silly. I was frankly stunned anyone took it
> seriously.

That was my suggestion, and no offense taken. I'm trying to help brainstorm 
some ideas for a solution at this point, and nothing is close to being set in 
stone (Hell, it's only 2 days after the announcement :) ). The idea is naive, 
but it would be a rather diplomatic first step in the attempt to get accurate 
data. In my post I attempted to point out that the requests would not just 
be "Pretty please?" and batting eyelids. We would present several of the 
benefits to them (yes there are several benefits to them that are not obvious 
at first - see earlier posts).

> They have ZERO motivation to help

See earlier posts again.

> Now, the folks who are discussing ways to get large vendors such as Yahoo,
> Google, Amazon etc involved with the enticement of a commercial opportunity
> are on the right track.

If neccessary, yeah, things may go this way. But judging by the outpouring of 
concern on this list, we have a decent enough user base to have a chance.

> The psychological fact is - every entity, whether an individual or
> corporation is 100% selfishly motivated. 

Quite true (mind if I call you Ayn? ;) ). That's why we are going to explain 
how this will help them in the long run. We are offering to provide a service 
that they currently pay for, but we are offering to do it for free. It will 
require some action on their end, but we are planning on making it a painless 
as possible.

Someone else with experience said:
>Asking the TV-stations to provide data in a common format is useless.
>I know because I have tried.

But if we can convince some of them to, it will help our work load. If they 
don't want to, if they'll provide it consistantly in any way they can, there 
are ways for us to parse it and pull out what we need and then reformat it.

If we can get enough of them to give data and we show success and build a high 
user base, the rest should follow. If they don't, we can always scrape them 
and make the best out of it.


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