MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing 236
An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."
Re:Site scraping works. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gentlemen[1], start your screen scrapers (Score:4, Informative)
Thank God for the BBC! (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the UK we don't have any of these problems of TV listing availability and complicated html parsing scripts which break every week. The BBC have a special web page just for XMLTV downloads [radiotimes.com], and it doesn't just cover BBC channels, but practically every channel you can receive in the UK (check the channels.dat file for a full list). The only restriction is that the data can only be used for private non-commercial purposes.
Of course, most of this is probably being paid for from our TV license fees which I know many Americans regard as being a terrible communist plot (some funding may come from the cover price of the Radio Times magazine).
Re:Commercials? (Score:3, Informative)
Getting the timing of the commercials is not very likely, I don't see it as an acceptably foolproof means of blocking the ads.
Re:Commercials? (Score:3, Informative)
On Law and Order, the black screen "481st trial part" screen can sometimes set it off and a chunk of show is flagged. If that happens, you have to turn off autoskip and just fast-forward through the commercials.
More than just a schedule (Score:3, Informative)
You're right of course that OTA broadcasters could and should provide free program listings in some common format. However as things have evolved there is so little demand for such a service that there's been no incentive for them to do so.