MythTV changes.

[Colin McGregor]

--- Alex Beamish <talexb-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 6/22/07, Colin McGregor <colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Small note (small because I can see writing about
> this
> > at greater length in a magazine article :-) ),
> Zap2it
> > labs is dropping TV listing support for MythTV
> users
> > in North America effective September 1st. So all
> of us
> > using MythTV will need to upgrade / change our
> boxes
> > between now and then. Before Zap2it labs the
> MythTV
> > people did "screen scraping" downloading web pages
> and
> > extracting the required data that way, and that
> MAY be
> > what the MythTV returns to after September 1st,
> stay
> > tuned.
> 
> 
> How soon will it be before Google picks up on this
> and fills the gap with
> their own service?

Not sure where there is a play to Google's advantage
here. Google's primary revenue stream comes from
people seeing ads on-line, if they are watching TV
that goes away. If a another major information
provider were looking to enter this area Google might
enter the area as a defencive move, but I don't see
that happening. 

All the serious Google competitors in this area,
Yahoo, etc, face the same issue, TV takes eyeballs
away from search. For Microsoft's Live service there
are the same issues as with Google, plus MythTV is a
threat to Microsoft's multi-media software.

For TV stations, for the most part there is no
incentive to co-operate with the MythTV folks, since
MythTV drops most advertising automatically. For the
non-commercial stations (TVOntario, PBS, etc.), the
issue is, they may be a will to co-operate with a
MythTV project, but if that co-operation involves
spending ANY money, well, the budget isn't there.

For the cable TV / satellite TV companies the
disincentive to helping MythTV is that MythTV would
hurt their sales/rentals of PVR boxes...

Some routes that I could see happening are:

- Screen scraping systems. This did work on the first
go-around of MythTV and is what is used outside North
America. This system has issues, but it is known to
work and can be done for free.
- A pay service where a firm gets (or multiple firms
get) $/year to offer data.
- An "free" advertising driven system where you get
the data free, but you must also deal with a once per
day/week e-mail advert. from (insert firm name here).
- Crazy volunteers who will collect/collate the data
then make it available via p2p networks.

The firms best positioned in my books to do the
advertising based "free" route are the ones that
already offer this data in other forms (read,
newspapers :-) ). As in how would GTA MythTV users
like their TV listing service, sponsored by "The
Toronto Star" or "USA Today" or ....

Well, remains to be seen which of the above will win
out (it maybe something I have not thought of, or I
may have misjudged Google/Yahoo/etc.).  It maybe that
a few dozen volunteers across North America with even
less of a life than most of the folks on this mailing
will deliver a volunteer driven solution, who knows.
It may be that we will be looking at more than one
"winner", a pay service with lots of bells and
whistles, and screen scraping for the cheap :-) .

Colin McGregor

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