Roku Developer Program

[cyberon97]

is it possible for someone to make a tv guide app for tv's that dont have a built in guide lots of people would love this feature including me 😄

[malloys]

Interesting idea and do-able... but there's a hitch:

Most tv program data sources are licensed, not free, and they're fairly expensive to license most of the time.
Screen-scraping web sites with the data is usually a violation of the terms of use, and it's a fragile approach anyway.

There is 1 possibility that wouldn't burden the developer financially, but it does shift the cost of the data to the user.
Someone would have to develop a free/open source app and get "Schedules Direct" to approve it.
Assuming the app was approved, the user would then have to sign up for a Schedules Direct membership ($20/year) to get the actual tv program data.

So this raises the question - would you or other users be willing to pay the $20/year for the data if someone developed the app and made it free?

[debro1114]

I would be willing to pay $20/year for a tv guide

[scyber]

While its an interesting idea, I'm not sure of the practicallity of it. Afterall, if you browse the guide to find what you want, you'd then have to memorize the channel number, switch inputs to your "TV" device, then change the channel. It just doesn't seem very pratical.

As for costs, I think there are few sites that used to allow pay access to their apis (titan TV and zap2it IIRC). Not sure if they still do or not.

[kbenson]

Are you referring to a guide for cable/satellite or OTA transmissions? Don't all cable/satellite providers provide guides built into their STB devices? If it's OTA, that actually sounds interesting, and maybe we can find guide data without paying for a huge set of data that doesn't really apply...

[TheEndless]

zap2it.com (boy have they grown up since the last time I checked them out!) used to charge a nominal fee for local guide listings, and they offered a full blown API for accessing them. I believe Microsoft even licensed it for their Windows Media Center TV listings. I can't seem to find any information on their site anymore, though... :? This URL found via Google would seem to suggest it still exists... http://api.zap2it.com/channelfinder/versus/

[tboneus]

Yes, I too thought of zap2it. They used to provide data for a tv card and If I recall they could be used in xbmc.

[jbrave]

http://forums.schedulesdirect.org/viewforum.php?f=8

[malloys]

"tboneus" wrote:
Yes, I too thought of zap2it. They used to provide data for a tv card and If I recall they could be used in xbmc.

Tribune Media Services, which is Zap2it's parent company, pulled the plug on "Zap2it labs" and it's free tv schedule data and web API in September of 2007.
That's why the Schedules Direct non-profit was formed by some of the MythTV (and related projects) folks - to act as a replacement for the now-defunct Zap2it labs api.
They license the data from Tribune Media Services, and pay for it through membership subscriptions ( http://www.schedulesdirect.org/aboutus )

[cyberon97]

On my tv I don't have to exit the input to change channel I just enter the channel number I have an older tv a CRT tv and a HDTV so I want it for my CRT tv