Brad Templeton wrote: ...
So, anybody speculate when they will decide to start charging?
Pretty much the same time Greenwich starts charging for using NTP. You gotta figure that that are giving out the correct time for now so that they can charge subscription fees later on ;-).
TMS, Gemstar and the like don't create TV listing information. They gather it from TV stations and networks. TV stations make money by selling commercial time with the rates based on Nielsen ratings. Stations need to let viewers know when their shows are on so that people will watch. The purpose of listings services is to distribute the stations listings for the benefit of the stations. If the service didn't deliver listings to potential viewers, the stations would take their business to someone else who would. In this sense, their business is somewhat like the junk mail with all the retail and grocery store adds. There is no need to worry that you will be charged to receive these coupons.
These companies do hold patents, copyrights and trademarks and they do charge organizations for the right to re-distribute the data that their service has organized. This is what the Zap2it open letter is about, the data should be available to individuals but it is dirty pool to surreptitiously re-distribute the data without acquiring the right$.
DataDirect is a Good Thing for us so it is easy to jump to the conclusion that there's got to be a catch and they're out to screw us somehow. However, TMS actually pushed for and created DD for their own selfish benefit.
There are programs that use listings data. That genie is not going back in the bottle. The obvious thing to do is to write a scraper like XMLTV. An http hit is a hit whether it is viewed in a browser or written to a file to be stuffed into a database. Since the individuals are grabbing the data for themselves (which is what their client stations want) there is nothing wrong with this.
However, it is terribly inefficient for their zap2it website to have each individual making hundreds of hits each day. They are better off bundling and compressing the data for your local listings. This is a big win for them but there's more. Because you need them to know which provider and what channels you do and do not want to receive, they can require registration for you to get the bundled data. This means they get to build a user list and gather demographic info as a bonus. They have a bogus survey (What applications are you using with DD? [mythtv]. Isn't is a pleasant day we're having? [yes]) to verify which accounts are still active.
If they tried to charge for this service, people would simply go back to scraping. Their webservers would be bombarded and they would lose their source for demographic information.
Not gonna happen.
-- bjm
_______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
