[mythtv-users] LxMSuite.com to provide services to the Myth community

David Brieck Jr. dbrieck at gmail.com
Fri May 6 13:49:37 UTC 2005


On 5/6/05, Donavan Stanley <geckofiend at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I find it amazing that a company who provides a fantasic service to
> our poprject gets treated like the bad guy so often. First, dealing
> with individual customers is not in Tribune's buisness model. Second
> even if it *was* their model there's not enough users to make a market
> for a company of that size. And last, they're well aware of the fact
> that people would go right back to scraping.
> 
> The free DataDirect offering saves Tribune money just by virtue of
> being there so people don't scrape their website. That alone ensures
> it's survival. That being said, it's also a stagnant product. It'll
> never get any new features, new data or anything like that.



Sorry to sounds like a pessimist here but Tribune never does anything 
without a reason. Take for example their cars.com <http://cars.com> website. 
Did you know that the only companies allowed to upload listings (from 
dealers, not individuals) are companies that are owned by one of the 
newspaper companies that are directly involved with the site? An independent 
newspaper can't even get a quote on how much it costs.

Tribune, Gannet and Knight Ridder (all owners of cars.com <http://cars.com>) 
have been buying up all of the independent newspapers around the county in 
order to gain a oligopoly in the industry. To say that they are doing this 
just to keep people from scraping their data is foolhardy. What they have 
managed to do is gain the goodwill of the community in order to make 
everyone rely on their data direct service. 

Think of it this way, replace Tribune with Microsoft and tell me if you 
would feel the same way. There is always an angle.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20050506/d93ff623/attachment.htm


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list