MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing

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."

$5/mo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... that's what I pay for my TiVo.

Commercials?

[mitchskin]

I'd be willing to pay to get a machine-readable schedule of shows. But I'd certainly be willing to pay more for a machine-readable record of exactly when the commercials were.

Not that that's likely to happen any time soon.

Re:too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah. That's about the same Comcast charges, and their PVR allows you to record encrypted HD and digital channels, something Myth cannot do.

Re:too much

[whmac33]

But I wonder how many people will take the time to scrape screens when a easy solution is available for a few bucks.

I'd certainly rather pay a couple bucks and try to keep up the screen scraping code with the guide data websites.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Site scraping works.

[Frogbert]

Whilst a pay service might work well the fact is that site scraping can be very effective and provide very good results.

Australian users have never really had guide data available to them, so we have basically relied on either IceTV [icetv.com.au], a (very well done) for-pay data source, or ozTivo [tuhs.org]. Recently Australian users have had a new resource, Shepherd [whuffy.com].

Shepherd is basically a bunch of scripts that are automatically updated and designed to read quite a few websites and data sources (including IceTV and ozTivo) and provides the best quality data I've seen so far. The set up is relatively easy, if you can get MythTv set up you can certainly get Shepherd set up, and doesn't require ongoing maintenance, once you get it working the script will keep itself up to date.

The TLDR version: Site Scraping can and does work well.

Re:confused....

[whoever57]

I mean, do they want people to pay for their content and watch advertisements or not?

As long as it is only a small number of people, they don't care if you don't watch the ads -- there is no way to gather statistics on whether you watch the ads or not, so it is ultimately the advertisers' problem. If a large number of people skip ads, then it would affect pricing for adverts which would make it the cable companies' problem.

So, bearing that in mind, the cable companies want you to pay them as much as possible. They would rather have you rent a DVR service from them for $10/month, than pay much less for programming information.

Gentlemen[1], start your screen scrapers

[Anonymous Coward]

But before you do, let me just fill you in on how the Australian experience went, and why paying may not be such a bad thing.

Historically, there's been no XMLTV guide data source for Australians. So there have been a litany of screen scrapers that downloaded guide web pages, massaged them into XMLTV format, and passed them on to MythTV and friends.

The only problem is, the program guides are controlled by the TV networks, and the TV networks hate us. Ouch, but true. They've made the leap of logic that, if we had program guide data on our DVRs, we can skip the commercials.[2] So they've been arguing that they own the copyright to the guide data[3] and any unauthorised use of it (i.e. screen scraping) is a breach of their terms.

The only commercial company to publish guide data for DVRs is IceTV [icetv.com.au] and they've been a lawsuit magnet from abovementioned TV networks. Not many people would pay a monthly subscription to something that could be killed at any time.

Meanwhile, in screen scraping land, it's been a game of cat-and-mouse. Find a web site that publishes guide data. Write a screen scraper (or wait for someone else to). In a few months, notice that nothing's been scheduled for a few days - the screen scraper has broken because they've (intentionally) changed the format to deter this. Find another web site. Repeat.

They did all sorts of things to deter us. Obfuscation through JavaScript. Only allowing n page views per hour. After they converted all the guide details to GIFs, we gave up. Most people have moved to IceTV or ozTiVo [tuhs.org].

The ozTiVo guide is an interesting idea. It's essentially a wiki that people manually fill in with guide data. Then you can use its XMLTV interface to get guide data out. You're reliant on other people to fill it in, and (due to above copyright issue in Australia) a lot of program details are generic or omitted. But it's workable. This is a model which other people may be interested in setting up.

Fortunately for IceTV, in the last few days, it won its court case [smh.com.au] and is now happily legit.

So, to sum up, we in Australia are actually happy to pay for quality guide data. Because we know the alternatives. If someone wants to set up a screen scraper, good luck to you - we fought the good fight and lost, but maybe you won't.

--

[1] Ladies too!
[2] No, I don't know how they came up with that either.
[3] In Australia, this has historically been a grey area.

Re:too much

[Doogie5526]

Well, with an open system you can do extra stuff. You could set up a web frontend where you can schedule your service. You could have your box email or sms you if it finds something you may like (and respond if you wish to record it). I'm sure there's many other things that I haven't even thought of that are available on an open system (or if your closed system company decides to allow you to do this via their implimentation).

Solution: An old ReplayTV = Free data

[maybenot]

I finally gave up on MythTV. Just never worked quite right. I bought a ReplayTV 3000 (similar to tivo) used for $10, popped a 80gig i had lying around, downloaded the replay TV software to the new hard drive and booted it up. Works great and the wife loves it. To download the TV shows it hooks into the phone line, in this case Vonage and dials up a local number to download the show info / tvguide. All the replay 1000, 2000, and 3000 devices all have a lifetime subscription. When I got it running,, the messagges inbox had mail from 1999 the lasttime it was used so im not worried about replaytv shutting me off. If they did, i paid $10 for the unit. Big whoop. MythFV was fun, but this old unit always works,, gets free lisitings and i dont have to mess with the software.

Makes BeyondTV an economical alternative

[steve-san]

If you're willing to use a Windows box for DVR, I'll eagerly suggest BeyondTV.

I had tried all the free alternatives -- MythTV, GB-PVR, Mediaportal... none of them were particularly friendly to work with or stable, for that matter. And what good is a DVR if it crashes before it can record your shows??

IMO, the Zap2ItLabs discontinuation was one of the best sales pitches for BeyondTV. One-time software purchase, and no subscription fees. It works flawlessly with my HDHomeRun dual tuner (also highly recommended), and even came with a "free" RF remote (looks like they're still running that special at snapstream.com).

Yeah, there's no capturing encrypted signals, but I have the MOST basic cable package anyway, just to get all the major networks, plus Discovery & a few others.
Many folks (even Comcast's cable monkeys) don't realize that the cableco's must (according to FCC) transmit the rock-bottom basic cable package *in the clear* (so no special cable box is needed); you get this digital signal when you order the most basic analog package. So for 18 bucks a month, I can receive/record all the major network digital HD goodness I can stand, with commercial skipping in BeyondTV. Place shifting? No problem. It's my MPEG2 file...

My one little way of giving the Finger To The Man.

This sounds good, but I'm lazy

[davmoo]

I really do hope this succeeds.

My biggest problem with the MythTV route was reliable scheduling information. I don't want to have to bother with the tedium of tweaking screen scraper scripts every other day. I gave up on the homemade TV box a long time ago and went with a TiVo. I bought in on one of their deals that with a three year commitment, the box was free. I like the TiVo method...tell it which programs I want at the start of the season, and then I can forget about it.

If there were a *reliable* alternative for scheduling information that I didn't have to tweak every time I turned around, even if there is a fee, I'd be tempted to try MythTV again.

But until then, my TiVo is my best friend.

Re:To those complaining about installing MythTV

[nagora]

and you're compiling from source... don't.

Actually, installing from source under Gentoo is probably the single easiest way to install MythTV. I've had less trouble with Gentoo than with binary installs, although they were a year or two ago now so things might have picked up.

TWW

Re:$5/mo?

[dwandy]

Screen scraping works. Sort of.

Has anybody ever thought about capturing/OCRing the digital guide itself? My cable-co provides a listing that I can cycle through ... could this be automated and 'scraped' (OCR'd) on a scheduled daily basis? This would always give you seven days of future listings...

Re:$5/mo?

[Afrosheen]

That assumes the listings are valid. Here in Dallas on Time Warner, not only is there a permanent 5 minute skew on every recording (sometimes 10 minutes), some shows have TBA listed and some are consistently just wrong.

The cable co. is the last entity I'd trust to get this data from.

Re:Commercials?

[Mr_Perl]

In reality, at least with my antenna based TV which is sometimes a little fuzzy, myth only catches half of the commercials, but there are no false positives at least. A shared commercial position database would be a very interesting proposition for me.

I'll pay it, here's WHY:

[BobMcD]

I've been interested in this whole TV-on-the-PC scene since I first witnessed it on one of those infamous Toshiba desktops. It was cool back then, and it is still cool today.

I used Media Center for about two years, and basically loved it. I purchased the extender for my Xbox and enjoyed that too. During this time I was watching Myth and hoping it would come along and improve the experience. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get it to run. It didn't like me, and I didn't particularly think much of it. We needed counseling...

A friend of mine tipped me off to Ubuntu at about the 6.06 point. I was a die-hard RedHat fan, still pining for the days before Fedora was born, when things were simple, etc. Switching off of my bastard children of CentOS and Fedora was not looking too likely. Until that is I used Synaptec to install MythTV. It 'just worked'. Seriously. I've tweaked and tweaked and tweaked it since then, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't any more or less difficult for me than MCE was.

The features that I'd miss from Myth, were I to switch are:

1) Different sources have different schedules. I have ONE cable box, and a dedicated tuner just for The channels lower than 74 are captured by a separate dual-tuner card. This way the wife gets her movies, and the kids still get Spongebob and Pokemon. I get to have my cake and eat it too.

2) Choice of endpoints. I can watch Myth content via the web (with a flash-mod to Mythweb), on my Ubuntu partition of my laptop as a frontend, on my Windows stuff with the MythTV player, and probably in a lot of ways I haven't thought of yet. There's no vendor standing there telling me 'no', and I love it.

3) Freedom in general. I didn't like Myth's built-in-DVD player, so I use an external player. No one cared. No hacking was required. I just changed it. Likewise, I didn't want to stream gigabytes across the tubes, so I modified Mythweb to convert to flash videos instead. Much smaller and easier on the pipe-joints. I have a myriad of other choices waiting my preference should the default not fit my needs anymore. I LOVE that.

4) Commercial skip. Annoying at times, but generally super pleasant. If you've been watching Fox lately, you might be aware that there's a Simpson's Movie in theaters. That is, if you've been watching Fox's commercial space it was likely tattooed on your eyelids. I back-spaced into one once to see the trailer and was shocked. That stuff was absolutely pervasive! I thought it was a nice testament to Myth that I mostly didn't have to endure that particular media blitz. And that's just that one show...

5) Love. Myth to me still seems young. It reminds me of my kids. In that way, I feel like I'm watching a teenager enroll for his freshman year in High School. I'm a proud papa of my Myth solution at this point, and don't want to see it die or fade into obscurity.

So yeah, I'll pay it. I'd love to see it go down, as it used to be free, but I understand that things with value are often exchanged for cash. Services included. And that's okay...

Re:confused....

[ediron2]

>> Now comcast charging me $50+ for 6mbit when i could get several times that for half the price in South Korea, that's about greed!
>Isn't that more about cost of living?

Bandwidth prices reflect so much more than cost of living:

• most of all: underlying infrastructure. Central Africa can't get cheap broadband like Norway can.
  
• what the market will bear. This has *some* bearing on demographics and cost of living.
  
• Equipment costs. New, faster gear at the ISP costs more.
  
• Upstream costs. This kind of gets into underlying infrastructure, and kind of into backbone competition.
  
• Market density: new, dense-construction deployment costs are way cheaper than retrofits and very rural areas.
  
• Topography: we've got mountains and not many trees. Wireless is easy in the American west, which makes rural wifi an option. The same service would never work in flat, heavily forested areas like New Jersey.
  
• Cost and availability of good techies to run the stuff. Again, reflects cost of living.
  
• Good market penetration: divide the company payroll and capital depreciation by # of customers.
  
• Competition within the market, especially if someone bundles to create asymmetric competition (Phone plus data vs. TV plus data)
  
• How willing the market is to pay for the service. This matters all the way down to neighborhoods: last-mile fiber will be retrofitted into rich-geek neighborhoods before it'll go into a dilapidated warehouse district where nobody'll subscribe or care.
  
• Greed -- I knew two companies (50 miles apart) that pioneered wireless high speed data in our area. Their price points were astronomically different ($125 / mo. vs. 750 /mo.). The expensive guy had terrible service (he ran the whole business himself, so he was routinely 3+ days behind on service calls) and shut down after 2 years, but made a freakin' fortune in that time.
  

I'm sure there are more, and possibly are even some *big* ones. Economic influences aren't sterile, mathematical critters. That's why everyone else is nattering about this: there are *some* linkages (to Greed or to Cost Of Living), but there are also some sneaky coincidences and some costs that have nothing to do with cost of living. The resulting data becomes tantalizingly close to looking like there are pure relationships when many of these factors are identical for two places, but anyone trying to force the data into one reason sees that exceptions keep popping out, like some warped economic Whac-a-mole game.

I was initially surprised you got got all these replies. Then again, slashdotters' knack for dumbass comments on NASA should have primed me for this level of gap-filled reasoning on economic theory. Nerdcore egos aside, we really don't know everything about everything.