Screen scraping
From MythTV Official Wiki
Screen scraping is the colloquial name for the technique of retrieving data programmatically from a source which was originally set up to provide it to people, rather than programs.
It originated in the IBM mainframe/3270 days, but has enjoyed a resurgence in these days of the web.
Before Zap2It Labs introduced their Data Direct service, XMLTV utilized screen scraping to acquire US program listing data.