TV Data needed for the UK

[srcurtis]

We need a reliable way of getting TV listings here in the UK, until then I think I'll unfortunately be going back to TiVo.

Is there any chance that Sage can get involved in making listings available for a fee?

What is the cost of purchasing the data for distribution?

How many UK sage users are there?

Any help/resolution would be much appreciated.

Steve

[kny3twalker]

not to be angering Frey but BTV has planned real EPG for those outside of the US

hopefully SageTV will follow suit

[nielm]

Originally posted by srcurtis
What is the cost of purchasing the data for distribution?

Approx UKP 15,000 per annum plus UKP 5000 setup costs (see other posts by me in the UK forum).

[kwallin]

Some of the channels in UK are covered by o2grabber, you will find it here http://www.o2design.se/o2grabber/.

use "o2grabber.exe -grab" to run it in the background.


Regards, Kenneth

[srcurtis]

Any idea on how many UK residents would be prepared to subscribe to a reliable service?

Steve

[parkimar]

From my own perspective,
I would be willing to pay about 10GBP per
annum for this type of service.

I currently use (although it's stopped working lastfew days aaargh!) XMLTV.

If Frey won't include UK tv listings, I would like to see SAGE TV have a quick, easy and reliable method for importing XMLTV.

Im aware of the plugins already doing the rounds, but they are supported by the user community , not Frey.

Cheers

Mark

[srcurtis]

Yep, I've been using XMLTV up until 2 days ago. Radio Times are now blocking requests from XMLTV and therefore XMLTV is now dropping UK support. We need a reliable alternative that gives us SKY listings as well as terrestrial.

I'm prepared to put some money in if the sums add up.

I think that people would need to be prepared to pay far more than £10 per year though.

Steve

[parkimar]

Hi,

I was basing the 10GBP on the Digiguide price.

Which does provoke the thought, maybe instead of XMLTV frey could just offer the facility to upload data from the Digiguide file (I believe it is straightforward format) .
This way they don't have to licence the listings themselves, they just provide the facility for those of us who have paid, to load our own data in. Basically, at the moment, we pay the same price as US users and get less, it doesn't seem a lot to ask.

Cheers

Mark

[bmadgett]

The whole question of a DigiGuide-format reader has been gone over many times I believe - the problem is that a) it's an encrypted format that's stored on your PC (so you can't just read it into another program), b) their license agreement with the listings providers means Digiguide have to ensure the data isn't "redistributable" ie it has to make sure you (the end user) can't republish the data elsewhere and c) their business model depends on you using the Digiguide application, which I think they have plans to make more PVR-ish, so obviously wouldn't want you to be able to use their data in say SageTV.

I would be happy to pay say £5 a month for a reliable, accurate, full-featured listings provider. That's about what you pay if you buy the Radio Times magazine (90p) each week.

The RT XMLTV grabber still kind-of works once you apply a bit of a patch to the perl, but if the RT site are now actively trying to block grabbers (rather than this just being an accidental change that happened to break the XMLTV grabber), I can't see the RT grabber lasting long. The only alternative I know of then is Bleb (bleb.org), which seems fairly reliable but is lacking a lot of the channels I want (eg it only has Discovery, not Discovery-Civ, Discovery-SciTrek etc, it doesn't have the various +1 Channels).

Fingers crossed someone decides it'd be worth reselling listings for the UK. £15k a year? So ballpark figures mean a breakeven would need 250 people paying a fiver a month. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me... I suppose you'd need to add overhead costs (hardware, bandwidth, etc).

Barnaby

[parkimar]

Hi,

thanks for the reply.
You raise some valid points. I checked the digiguide format, you are correct. The only workarounds I could see are on 2 fronts:
1) the latest digiguide has a webserver version, that could be made available to a grabber.
2) Frey and digiguide make an agreement, whereby Digiguide create a version of thier subscription that provides the info in a format encrypted explicilty for Frey. I would probably cough up as much as you have mentioned as well. So for Digiguide this would be good business, but I guess Frey would want a cut of that as well, as recompense for writing a parser that could read in the encrypted data.

I guess neither of these are particularly realistic and are probably beyond the scope of this forum.

Cheers

Mark

[nielm]

Originally posted by parkimar
1) the latest digiguide has a webserver version, that could be made available to a grabber.
2) Frey and digiguide make an agreement, whereby Digiguide create a version of thier subscription that provides the info in a format encrypted explicilty for Frey. I would probably cough up as much as you have mentioned as well. So for Digiguide this would be good business, but I guess Frey would want a cut of that as well, as recompense for writing a parser that could read in the encrypted data.

I guess neither of these are particularly realistic and are probably beyond the scope of this forum.

This has been discussed before. See the links to the digiguide forums in this post.
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...3328#post23328

Digiguide's Terms+conditions expressly forbid running a grabber on the web pages.
Digiguide's licence with their listings provider only allows them to use the listings information on the web and in the digiguide program.
Digiguide themseleves don't believe that their are enough PVR users to renegotiate their liicence (and they seem to be developing their own PVR-ish thing anyway, but they are way way behind).

[parkimar]

Point taken, I've read the full forums output (not a quick job!).

Cheers

Mark