A free source for UK listings (was: Re: [mythtv-users] UK Listings - No Joy From Digiguide)

John Knottenbelt jak97 at doc.ic.ac.uk
Fri Jan 23 12:07:51 EST 2004


n Friday 23 January 2004 16:21, Dan Sheridan wrote:
> Somebody should get in touch with http://www.broadcastingdata.com/ who
> seem to do this sort of thing as a business (from their website it
> seems they supply NTL, for example) and find out how much they would
> charge for this sort of service.
>
> They also have a free ftp site with 7-day listings on it for BBC, ITV
> and five (not Channel 4, as far as I can see) in a sort of free-form
> text format that would need some clever parsing.

Indeed. I was thinking about this myself. I think it would be a trivial for 
BroadcastingData to provide the data CSV (comma separated value) or some 
such. I have a hunch that BroadcastingData don't want to deal with the 
end-user, but rather want to deal with a company. They are London based, so 
if we can get this together we might be able to arrange a meeting with them.

Here is my idea for that company:

The company which has a web-site where you can buy a quota of 
downloads (something like GBP ?? for 365 downloads). The account could be 
set to renew automatically when the downloads run out (or not). The idea of 
the quota is so that if you share your account username and password with 
somebody else then you simply use up your credit sooner.

The company could provide the TV listing in XMLTV formats (keeping up to date 
with the latest XMLTV format as an option) by translating from the 
BroadcastingData format. 

Terms and Conditions could be that listings may not be redistributed and are 
for personal use only.

Could have different pricing schemes depending on how far you want to look 
into the future?

I think that there is definitely some demand for a sevice like this, but the 
real question is if there is enough demand to make the idea fly.

Cheers

John



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