[mythtv-users] Data Direct Subscription Expires?

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Mon Jan 3 03:42:16 EST 2005


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



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