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Zap2It Labs Discontinuing Free TV Guide Service
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jun 20, 2007 03:01 PM
from the not-a-myth dept.
from the not-a-myth dept.
QuijiboIsAWord writes "Zap2It Labs, which provides free TV listing data for personal use, has long been the main source of program guide information for users in the US and beyond. They've announced via their webpage that,
due to abuse of the service, data will no longer be available after September 1st. There is no other direct source, and no option to pay for the service even if the users wanted to. Without a data feed of this type, users will be reduced to scraping websites at best. Is this going to be a killing blow for MythTV?"
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Linux: MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing 236 comments
An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."
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Zap2It Labs Discontinuing Free TV Guide Service
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This is troubling (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday December 04 2005, @12:42PM)
Re:This is troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
They seem to forget that a substantial chunk of those viewers wouldn't be watching at ALL, if it weren't for DVRs. I like a show that's on when I'm usually playing with my kids. If I didn't have a DVR, I wouldn't watch that show period. Yes, I skip through many of the commericials during playback, but not all of them, and not if the commercial catches my eye, or is for a product I'm interested in. I even rewind to watch a commercial from the start (like if I skip into the middle of a Mac/PC ad I haven't already seen) etc.
Before I had a DVR I hit mute and/or pipped the commercials while I browsed the channel guide, or checked on the hockey game, or something. Its not like I was sitting there 'attentively watching' all the ads before.
I expect advertisers are probably losing eyeballs overall as people adopt DVRs, but its probably not nearly the issue they think it is.
Re:This is troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
This was always MythTV's achilles heel, more than even HDTV. For all the talk about "Unlike Tivo, MythTV can NEVER be shut down or crippled," MythTV always had this dependency on a third party, for profit service. It's possible someone could replace them, but they're going to want SOME form of revenue (and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely).
Re:This is troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the choice between:
1. paying Comcast's fees, DVR service, etc
2. paying Tivo or
3. paying for a subscription to an XML TV Listing service, and keeping my MythTV box
I'll take #3.
People will pay for it as long as no free alternatives are out there.
TV stations are hardly interested in helping... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?
The best way to get the information is from the stations and cable operators.
Unfortunately, MythTV and other PVR users are in the game of cutting out ads; TV programming is purely to sell ad space, and always has been, save when programs were entirely paid for by one company and the show was branded in their name. What motivation do TV stations have to assist people who are purposefully going out of their way to cut out the ads?
Re:TV stations are hardly interested in helping... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday October 04 2004, @03:55PM)
Re:This is troubling (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://reverend.healeys.net/)
Anybody know what the "abuse" was? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/ | Last Journal: Saturday April 29 2006, @04:33PM)
Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/ | Last Journal: Saturday April 29 2006, @04:33PM)
I think you're trying to suggest that Slashdot readers are, generally, hypocrites because they don't care if new technology or business models drive old ones out of business. Of course, that's utter nonsense. This isn't about Zap2It's business model being harmed by new technology or new business models. This is about Zap2It offering something to individuals for free out of simple generosity. This generosity has been abused and does threaten their business model, so they going to stop being generous. Zap2It doesn't suffer in the slightest, only those who benefited from their generosity do.
Now, if a third party started giving away television schedules without relying on Zap2It's data, harming Zap2It's business model, then we'd be on the same ground. Of course, if that happened and Zap2It whined about it, I don't think you'd see much sympathy here.
Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)
According to a posting on mythtv.org... [mythtv.org]
Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, the content was provided free provided it remained for non-commercial use. After all, commercial ventures have to pay for those listings and if they could get it for free, nobody would pay.
I hope they at least tried to weed out the abusers before just cutting the cable.
How is MythTV dead? (Score:4, Informative)
Achilles Heel (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://nedwolf.com/ | Last Journal: Friday September 30 2005, @01:10PM)
Looks like five years later, it's still the only plan.
This is quite bad :( (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.kalpol.com/)
Re:This is quite bad :( (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
it's the new management, they hate that OSS people are getting access to the data and want to stop it.
Misuse? (Score:3, Insightful)
TitanTV (Score:4, Informative)
The Titan TV web site includes advertising and also does tracking. While personally, I don't care if anyone knows I watch StarGate and Myth Busters, privacy issues may be a concern for some.
Going, going, gone? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first, they made me fill out a big online survey as "payment" for the service. The first time it was about 30 questions.
The third time (this is like every 3-6 months) they only asked one question.
For the last year, the survey has been "click here to renew."
What's with that? I'm willing to give up some personal time and info to pay for this service, and they can't even think of a way to leverage that?
The main listings (Score:4, Informative)
I've always just setup an easy shortcut to their web page to get listings, so I really don't think this will affect my usage in the least.
The killing blow? I think not. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/ | Last Journal: Saturday April 29 2006, @04:33PM)
I don't see the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://integramod.tripod.com/)
There's multiple sites out there with TV listings: Yahoo TV, Zap2It, MeeTV (the one I use), etc. Just write perl scripts to capture the listing information from these sites, and modify MythTV to allow the user to choose any service he wishes. Of course, some of these sites may (stupidly) screw with their HTML in order to throw off these scripts, but that's easily worked around with regular updates. So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.
No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution. There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages.
Killing blow? (Score:3)
(http://tpno-co.org/)
This will be a minor set back at worse. But, like any set back, it will make the overall product stronger.
That said..."NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://iheartjesdotus.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday June 05 2005, @05:40PM)
It sucks that it' shutting down (I use it for GB-PVR)- but they did do it for free for years. Let's not demonize them, no matter the reason, and start looking for alternatives.
MythTV devs are working on this... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.mysettopbox.tv/)
And it isn't just MythTV that uses the guide data provided...
Google should provide a WebService (Score:5, Insightful)
What if I was to write a web service? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.eq2cataclysm.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @10:03AM)
Any takers?
Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now there's just the question of who? Who is expert at spidering the web? Who likes to provide new cheap-to-free services in their quest to take over new markets. Who would love to put yet another spike into Microsoft's side by removing yet another possible revenue source for them? Who doesn't have to worry about financing such a small, cheap service alongside their already multitudes of underutilized servers and bandwidth?
Google?
We need GoogleTVListings (tm) (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it would be the best ever... With version numbers for each day and diffs available that only contain the changes. The whole thing would be available as an rss feed and would be free, of course.
Why not use Guide+? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could a computer not do the same thing?
Make it a paid service (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday June 09 2003, @06:24PM)
As for commercial abuse, if they know it's happening, they presumably are taking steps to quash it as well, without much luck. Probably like playing whack-a-mole.
Let's all hope Google comes to the rescue.
Re:Make it a paid service (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's say that MythTV implemented your paid service plan and began charging the princely sum of $2 per month for the data.
I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge. It would be a daily torrent that you could pull, or a streamed RSS feed, a static layout site with a downloadable screen scraper, or any one of a dozen other ways I can think.
So now instead of a million dollar revenue stream you'd get a thousand dollar revenue stream coming from the 500 users who would actually be wiling to pay when a free source is available.
If you can answer the question of how to prevent the above scenario from happening I can put you in touch with some content providers who will pay REAL money for your idea. The kind of money that allows people to retire for life...at the age of twenty.
What happened to Mythtv's paid service, TechnoVera (Score:3, Interesting)
I use DVR but what is Zap2It (Score:3)
Common sentiment (Score:3)
P2P Listings (Score:3, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
In small entries (enforced by the GUI) that don't trip the copyright of the original publisher. Or, like most P2P users, they'll ignore the copyrights.
It's like a Napster index that doesn't point to copyright violated media, but to fair use of one's own media subscriptions.
The real reason why TMS is killing Zap2It (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, what they're saying is that they will be changing their database structure, and can't be bothered to re-code the Labs.Zap2It part. They'd rather spend the time on other things, like increasing ad revenue.
Bear in mind that TMS charges each station (Somewhere in the region of $75/day) to collect their data, and charges their commercial end-users (somewhere in the region of $500/market/month) to provide the data. Quite a lucrative trade, wouldn't you say? Add to that advertising revenue from their site, and subtract bandwidth fees, and they still make a tidy profit.
It has been theorised that the main reason labs.zap2it was set up was to save bandwidth costs after XMLTV scrapers started hitting their public site. As the data was served up in chunks in the midst of a sea of other information (Links, advertisements, commentary, navigation etc) it cost considerably more in bandwidth, so it made more fiscal sense to offer the data for free, so they could track who was using it and where, along with only having to serve the data itself, with compression and selectivity. This is only a theory, mind, but considering how the Myth community (On it's own, without any of the other projects that were/are using Zap2It feeds) has grown, I think removing this option will drastically increase Zap2It's bandwidth bills without adding any ad revenue back into the pot (A scraper doesn't see ads, and doesn't care about them).
In other words, this could be a costly mistake for TMS. Here's hoping they see sense, and work out a way to work with MythTV and others.
Re:Myth will survive (Score:5, Informative)
Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously
Not having to deal with commercials inserted when you fast forward 30 seconds.
Re:Myth will survive (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.bobpaul.org/userScripts | Last Journal: Thursday February 22 2007, @04:05PM)
Tivo used to allow a really nice FF feature to skip commercials. Now they overlay advertisements on top of the advertisements you are fast forwarding through. Not to mention the advertising in the rest of the UI. If you own one, you should know what I'm talking about. If not, Google found me someone's blog with pictures [blogspot.com]
Re:No it doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.myspace.com/chrisstovall)
Re:No it doesn't (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to read the summary, or even the title. From what our fine
TCO indeed...when you figure in TCO for MythTV, you are taking into account the risk you take in your reliance on a free service that you have absolutely no control over, right? Because that's kind of necessary.
Re:No it doesn't (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Myth will survive (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, you can't honestly suggest that MythTV is always a better choice than Tivo, unless you've conveniently forgotten about the teeming masses of people who couldn't install a capture card if their life depended on it. Ease is the killer feature for Tivo and bundled PVRs.
It has another source (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.stdin.co.uk/)
But EIT has limitations (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.users.qwest.net/~lionlad/)
I've seen some of the newer LCD HDTVs sold here in the U.S. which have the ability to display program guide data, no doubt culled from available EIT data, but this is really intended to allow viewers to see what's on right now or in the immediate future without resorting to channel flipping. I bought a Sharp Aquos one generation before this feature became standard, so I missed out, but I really don't feel like I'm missing too much because of the described limitations.
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
For those folks with DirecTV, that's not an option. In fact, at this point, we have no options at all other than writing a guide scraper for TVGuide.com. Fortunately, their website data is fetched in Javascript using xmlHttpRequest, so it is probably straight XML in some dialect that could be converted into the same format as Zap2It uses with very little effort. If done carefully (request the entire schedule exactly once, then only refetch the current day each day and fetch any new days added to the schedule), it might not add enough server hits for them to even care.
Re:Myth will survive (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Myth will survive (Score:5, Insightful)
And here's how you can directly make money:
By providing your own guide information, you can insert sponsorship lines and charge for them.
"Tonight on Lost, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Jack and Kate have more awkward sexual tension, while Hurley tries to cheer everyone up, Sawyer acts rudely, and Sayid kills someone with his feet."
Even us DVR users will very often look at the guide information. Voila, you've just sold an ad!
Re:Myth will survive (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://nzruss.blogspot.com/)
People further down in the thread suggested that TV channel EPG is right up Google's alley, and I agree... just how do you persuade them???? Hopefully there are a few Mythtv users in the Googleplex that have the sway to pull this off. Google have the funds to purchase the EPG data, AND the customer base to insert ads in the stream (however ads would not be click-able).
Google... please buy ZAP2IT LABS!!! please!!!
Re:Myth will survive (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time a feed is lost and a new one is found, every time the guide feed changes, every user has to manually upgrade the software, and it's sure to happen many times in the future..
That is inefficient.
What would be ideal would be if myth boxes could connect to each other to form a peer-to-peer network and share some of their guide data with each other.
Let the authenticity of an entry update (in case of conflicting stories) be determined by the reported source of the update, a vote, and the "age" and reputation of the mythtv installations reporting the listing.
In that manner, when one feed dies, any mythtv user who can would be able to scrape or find listings data and provide it for the benefit of all mythtv users.
Also, no one mythtv node would necessarily need the full listings, they would only need to submit updates randomly based on newly acquired data, and to submit queries based on listings they're interested in.
I.E. channels the user is currently trying to lookup listings for, or channels in the channel lineup for the next few days, and searches for program names the user is interested in or wants recorded every time.