EPG support for Canada

[Lester Jacobs]

Hi,

I own the Creative VCR card and SageTV looks like a rather excellent replacement for the fairly basic software package provided by Creative. However, it appears that you do not (yet) support Canadian listings. I use zap2it and it certainly provides listings for Canada.

I was wondering whether support for Canada was on your timetable and if you were willing to comment an approximate timeframe for support.

Support for Canadian listings is definitely a showstopper from a purchasing perspective for me.

Regards
Lester

[dkardatzke]

Lester,

The only plans I can comment on now are to support the entire US by the end of the year. From there we will assess Canada and other countries. The decision is purely based on cost and I am aware of a lot of posts on different forums for Canadian support requests. We do have a desire to provide EPG support for you some day.

The only thing that could speed up the timetable was if we had a partner in Canada looking to benefit from the use of EPG data as well.

Dan

[Lester Jacobs]

Understood. I do have one more question to which I believe I know what the answer is, but for what it's worth...

Do you have any plans to allow users to import their own TV listings into the SageTV? This could be as simple as specifying a file format for SageTV listings and leaving it up to the users to create a file according to that format. Obviously what I'm getting at here is XMLTV and other such software.

This shouldn't present a legal problem for you since you would not be actually supplying any of the listings data yourself nor would you be supplying software to create the listings data. However, I could see you presenting an economic argument if you happen to make most of your money from your subscription based TV listings services.

However, providing a means for users to import their own listings data (however acquired) would definitely open up your software sales to those regions that are not covered by the SageTV service at present. I know I would definitely be buying your software if importing of listings was a possibility.

Any comment?


Regards
Lester

[dkardatzke]

We currently don't have any plans of opening up SageTV to imported listings. However I do see a possibility of allowing an interface with SageRecorder in the future.

The reason we can't do it with SageTV is that it would conflict with the data we are paying for from Zap2it. Our current goal is to cover our costs with the subscription based service. We will actually lose money on offering the EPG data for quite some time. Once we begin to break-even on the cost of the monthly data, we will reconsider the fees we charge to customers. We also feel that having a fully integrated EPG that is user friendly and easy to setup is the best offering over a third party interface.

Dan