From
an internal perspective
Yes!
seperate out Series, Episode numbers and Ep Titles into clear fields. It's
really useful if you were to use TV anytime data to populate programme support
sites like, say, bbc.co.uk/buffy or /theoffice - and becomes really important
for following ongoing series. It's something that the Radio Times do in a very
patchy way.
You
could, for instance, make a query engine that lets you build a personal schedule
around watching a show in story order across all the various channels and
repeats....
(I share a house with people who can occasionally be seen
screaming 'SPOILER!' and running from the room with their hands over their ears,
can you tell?)
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Graeme Mulvaney
Sent: 30 October 2005 14:30
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [backstage] Timezone bug?Looking at the synopses on sky; the episode information is usually the first sentence.On a slightly different note, is there any chance of including episode numbers for more series.. It's handy for shows like QI and Bodies which are prepeated on different channels.I appreciate that it makes little sense for ongoing shows, but for series like "Days that shook the World", which seem to pop up at random, it helps to keep track of what you may have missed - and gives you an idea as to when the current series will end.
On 10/30/05, Hywel Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:At 14:23 30/10/2005, you wrote:
>Hello, backstagers:
> It looks like the data generator on the BBC end is having timezone
>issues -- all data I have for today (from the 20051029 tarball) is an
>hour off. For a while I thought that it was on my end, but no, the
>actual XML files get it wrong.
>
>Also, I noticed that at least for some shows, the time in the ProgramURL
>does not agree with the time in the PublishedStartTime by a few minutes.
>What does this difference represent? Are the PublishedStartTimes simply
>inaccurate but look nice, or is there something more interesting going
>on?
>
>Also, rather unrelatedly, would it be possible to get the name of the
>episode in a seperate element from the free-text descriptions?
>
> Thank you,
> -=- James Mastros
I can't see anything wrong with the times in the data sets both for
today and the 29th's tarball. Remember that they're all in UTC
(hence the Z at the end of the time), so anything up until 31st
October appears to be out of synch by an hour. I'll look into it in
more detail tomorrow to ensure there isn't a problem, but at the end
of the day, it's up to the end application to sort out daylight savings.
The time difference you're seeing is the difference between the
published time and the actual time the playout server was going to
show the programme. Sometimes programmes may start early and at other
times late. More often or not, these days this is not accidental -
prerecorded BBC television services mostly come off servers these
days so the timing can be down to the second.
Having said that, the figures you're seeing are only a snapshot of
the estimated start times at 8am in the morning when the files are
generated. These times shift and change throughout the day. The
only "anchors" you'll notice are the 1, 6 and 10 o'clock news on BBC
One which start at the exact time published.
In the future, a TV-Anytime service may be broadcast along with a
tv/radio digital service or provided as a live Internet feed and this
exact time could be used to, say start a PVR or stream recorder.
As to separating the name - I'll look into the TV-Anytime standard to
see if there's a field for this (I don't recollect one) when I have
that hefty tome on my desk at work tomorrow. The synopsis provided
is in fact a slightly cleaned up version of the one that goes out to
Sky and Freeview, so to extract the title from the synopsis, I'd have
to somehow work out which part of the text is the episode title. If
there's a pattern, it's easy to write a filter. Where different
schedulers do it in different ways, that's where it gets complicated.
Hywel
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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