rmeden at yahoo
Jun 20, 2007, 12:58 PM
Views: 1366
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My name is Robert Eden and I wrote the DD grabber for XMLTV.
Of course XMLTV is in the same boat. I would love to help Daniel and
Issac with this as it's not a MythTV issue, it effects many U.S./Canada
open source projects (not just PVRs).
A scraper would work for my needs, but you PVR folks would lose lots of
important info (episode number, cast, synopsis, etc). When scrapers
were used, the Open Source PVR community was *much* smaller and the
demands on Zap2IT.com from scraping were so bad they kicked off the Data
Direct project. At the size of the customer base now, I'm sure there
would be a major cat and mouse game to keep a scraper working.
At the 12k/mo number previously posted for U.S. listings (which is in
line with old discussions I've had with Zap2IT) would require 7200 folks
paying $20/year to just pay for the listings. That doesn't take into
account, servers, bandwidth, legal (yes, lots of legal issues), and of
course personnel. While there *may* be a solution, it's not a simple
one and getting something up by 9/1 will be a challenge.
There are only two providers of TV listing in the U.S. Tribune and TV
Guide. As you've seen, they charge a pretty penny for the data. I can
see their concern about commercial entities using the DD service instead
of paying them for listings. If a new service is created, there will
have to be ways to prevent commercial entities from accessing the
data. I can see a charge of like $20/year/lineup, with tracking by IP
address to prevent excessive accesses. Of course that won't prevent the
"bad guys" from grabbing the data and redistributing it via their own
servers, but that's a copyright issue w/o a simple solution. Hopefully
by restricting the number of lineups per CC or paypal account will
cause too much trouble for them to redistribute data. Without an
"illegal redistribution" solution, I can see a problem even getting
redistribution rights.
Daniel and Isaac, please bring me in to help come up with a solution.
(out of band I imagine).
Robert
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XMLTV says hi...
