DataDirect
From MythTV
DataDirect was a program guide data feed service from Tribune Media Services' Zap2It division which provided clean, accurate, timely program listing data in the United States and Canada in XML format which could easily be used by programs like MythTV.
Service Shutdown
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Zap2It Labs discontinued providing data directly to MythTV and other end-users effective September 4, 2007. A group of developers from various open source and free-as-in-beer projects formed a new company called Schedules Direct, which replaces Zap2it Labs to become the official provider of US and Canadian TV Listings for MythTV (and other projects). Please see http://schedulesdirect.org/ for more information. |
There was a running poll of Zap2It users on their forums, started by a user, regarding users' willingness to pay for the service. As of July 20th, 2007, the number who had specified "Yes" they would pay, was 1474 (94%).
Coverage of the situation can be found here, among other places.
Some reasons and other comments given for the scheduled discontinuance, copied from the forum, copied from the mailing list:
- Continued use of the service to support commercial products, in violation of the agreement.
- Commercial products continued to grow despite previous appeals that this activity stop.
- There are significant changes to the supporting data structure forthcoming and we could not devote resources to the continued upkeep and enhancements of the service.
- Maintenance of the service is impacting our resource pool for other projects.
- We sought alternative options but were unable to find a solution.
- We recognize the hardship this creates for the user community. We are open to alternative solutions and would consider proposals that met the needs of the user community and our company.
- We looked into options to turn this into a paid service however we do not have the infrastructure at this time.
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Zap2It Labs
The service was available free of charge by periodically filling in surveys similar to the one presented during registration, and the data provider had no intention of charging for it in the future. However, the service was discontinued on September 4, 2007.
The DataDirect 'certificate code' for MythTV was ZIYN-DQZO-SBUT; you needed this when you created an account.
As of MythTV v0.19, the DataDirect grabber respects the service's Suggested Download Hour, to help reduce load on the DataDirect servers; to make use of this, you must be allowing mythbackend to run mythfilldatabase, instead of running it from your crontab. If you're running from cron, you should probably switch when you do the upgrade.
Evolution of DataDirect Services
Prior to the DataDirect service, the only method for obtaining guide data was via the 'standard' XMLTV grabber, which consisted of screen-scraping the data off of the TMS (Zap2It) web pages. This was problematic in its own way as it was never 100% accurate, and any web page modification meant that the grabber utility would likely fail. In addition, as XMLTV grabber user base grew (XMLTV grabbers are not specific to MythTV), the impact on their web servers increased exponentionally.
At some point in the recent past, Zap2It implemented DataDirect as a means for distributing their guide data in an efficient and compact way. This change revolutionized the distribution method of the guide data and, in addition to the guide data being more accurate, it has a number of advantages over the standard XMLTV tv_grab_na grabber (as stated in the MythTV How To, Chapter 5, Section 3):
- The tv_grab_na grabber is no longer supported and will not be fixed when problems occur.
- It's much faster, because the grabber isn't downloading hundreds of HTML pages and trying to parse the program data out of the HTML.
- It contains more program information.
- It's easier on the Zap2It servers, since they're not generating hundreds of custom HTML pages when you scrape their listings.
- The service is available free of charge by periodically filling in surveys similar to the one presented during registration, and the data provider has no intention of charging for it in the future.
April 2007 Data Issues
In April 2007, many users reported that DataDirect was reporting generic episode information for some channels. For example, the description of The Colbert Report became "Stephen Colbert and guests discuss current issues" for all episodes.
Some user responses could have been legitimately seen as hostile. See [mythtv-users]Data Direct "service", which also alleges several thread deletions and at least one banning.
The only known official response is at http://bb.labs.zap2it.com/viewtopic.php?t=1209 : "We are aware of this and are working to fix it." The thread was locked after this posting.
The underlying reasons for this problem are currently unknown. Zap2it forum moderators have demonstrated rapid banning of discussions and users, which suggests sensitivity to this issue; however, official response is almost nil. One explanation could be that zap2it has contractual or internal political issues that they feel they cannot comment on.
