> Hi James > > Your right - there are plenty of really good external resources out > there. Remixing content from varying sources is certainly a good > strategy to create a successful prototype. > > To that endeavour, we're certainly keen to list useful external feeds > within our Feeds and API's pages (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/). > > As you can appreciate, being an official BBC site, there are certain > restrictions placed upon me as to what I can link to from > backstage.bbc.co.uk. I'm not 100% of our position on bleb.org at this > point in time (hey, it's 3am on a bank holiday!) but I'm pretty sure > it's something we wouldn't be able to link to it if it scrapes it's > content from a third-party provider (I *believe* it does - but let me > know if you know better!) - I don't think there are any official, freely > licenced/legel UK TV listing XML sources on the Internet at the moment. > > If you guys want to start compiling lists of useful resources and links > like this on your own sites, I'll see if we can link to them. Let me > know > > > Cheers > Ben Metcalfe :: backstage.bbc.co.uk > >
The author of Bleb scrapes it's data from various sources, one being the bbc. Another source is radiotimes - they provide data aimed at the XMLTV community on a 'for personal use only' basis, which basically means you can grabit, convert it, but you can't republish it on the internet sample http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat It was created for the XMLTV community so they could use ther 14 day tv listings for there own personal projects (TV Guide, MythTV etc...) and it made better sense to provide the raw data instead of having to download 20Mb of data to produce a 500k file. It was good for both sides. To convert the raw data into xml (in this case xmltv) you can use a tool like the xmltv grabber (http://www.xmltv.org), or write something to convert it - I've written a perl script to convert the raw data to xmltv to populate my own personal tv guide (http://www25.brinkster.com/lakeuk/xmltv/xmltv.htm) What would be a good idea is if the beeb could provide the TV/Radio listings in XMLTV format (http://www.xmltv.org) maybe also including regional radio listings as these are not currently available anywhere else. The XMLTV community is always looking for alternative source to populate there personal system (short of scraping the data) Dave
