[mythtv-users] IMDB has TV listings.

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 09:39 -0400, joe.white at wachovia.com wrote:
> > Both of them charge all of their customers, both of them charge
> based
> > on what use the customer makes of the data, both of them would
> almost
> > certainly increase the charge to anyone who wanted to let 200K of
> *us* 
> > take the data, whether those people charged us, or not.
> > 
> There are 200K of us?  In North America? 

No, if there were we would have no trouble negotiating
a deal with Tribune. In the US, we're too big to have
individuals screen scraping for their own use anymore,
and we're too small to just pay the standard fee that
Microsoft and TiVo pay.

In most of Europe, guide data isn't as big a problem for
MythTV because they are further along in the digital
transition and provide much better EIT than we get here.

For those considering competing with TMS and TV Guide, you
should look at the Swedish example. There MythTV and XMLTV
devs created scrapers for each network and then approached
the networks for permission to republish the data when they
had a working example with that station. Some signed up right
away, others were reluctant until other networks signed
up and then they joined in. The TV station didn't have to
pay their developers to create some XML export, all they
had to do was sign on the dotted line. There are obvious
differences between the US and Sweden, the sheer scale of
the US means you would need to coordinate many more developers
and have many more people who can talk to TV executives
without scaring them. Plus individual TV stations serve a
larger number of people so even getting 5 minutes to demo
the guide data and its uses can be a problem. And there
are a few networks like HBO that probably wouldn't sign
up under their current management. I'm personally sceptical
that this is worth the effort, since I think we'll work
something out, but it is not an impossible task either.

-- Daniel