TVDB done March 2021

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

I just found this

TV Maze

If you want to add TV information to your website or app then you've come to the right place!

We provide a free, fast and clean REST API that's easy to use, returns JSON and conforms to the HATEOAS and HAL principles. The root url is http://api.tvmaze.com and the available endpoints are documented below. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the API, please post them on our forums.

If someone is willing to update BMT, why not use something that is free?

[stuckless]

I'm also interested in seeing how this plays out with Plex. As a lifetime plex-pass user, I hope they don't force user subscriptions

Someone asked about IMDB... it's possible, it used to work that way, but, you are screen scraping the site for information and that breaks whenever they update the site. It's not sustainable.

Phoenix (which is what BMT uses) has a pluggable metadata system. When/if anyone wants to work on this, I can certainly help with questions about what needs to be done, etc.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by stuckless

It's not sustainable.

Is any service that's currently provided for free sustainable? It's not like their users are even visiting a website where they can throw up some advertisement to help offset their costs.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

Is any service that's currently provided for free sustainable? It's not like their users are even visiting a website where they can throw up some advertisement to help offset their costs.

When I say it's not sustainable, I mean, from the development point of view the effort to keep the scraper up to date is extremely high. As I said, I used to have an imdb scraper, but, it broke weekly because of changes to the imdb HTML pages. Services that use JSON REST apis are sustainable, from a development point of view. They might change every couple of years, but that's far better than randomly changing every week.

But I agree with your point... A free service that offers data and images is not sustainable, given the costs to host and serve that data. They need to make money somewhere.

[wayner]

To pick up this conversation, they could move to a subscription model, like SD. Many folks From a variety of communities would presumably be willing to pay get this data, again just like SD.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by wayner

To pick up this conversation, they could move to a subscription model, like SD. Many folks From a variety of communities would presumably be willing to pay get this data, again just like SD.

Agreed. I’d pay $15 yr for it. Probably not enough from their standpoint.