Hi,
I'm currently looking for a EPG feed for use in JRiver, I have been looking at OTA but it's still as bad as ever. Not much detailed, high quality and up to date meta data. I'm not willing to be responsible for causing the shutdown of Schedules Direct, as obviously they have been finding out people are violating the agreement terms.
As in people are actively using their service for non-personal, commercial, non-hobbyist purposes, which is in violation of their Gracenote data license. Even when using an approved application to obtain the data from their service, its where it finally ends up (JRiver) that's the violating part! So if the final destination and use purpose is approved along with the application then it's alright.
For example personal, non-commercial, hobbyist use in an approved app listed in the website obtained with xmltv; then it won't violate their license. Anything else will violate their license, then the more people doing this the more likely they are to be shutdown. Which would deny those abiding by the terms applied, access to the service where they won't be able to afford the the fees for Gracenote or other legal station and content owner approved providers.
They give the show title (and sometimes subtitle) or movie title, a basic short description not many characters. Often mixed with other meta data in the same field (if added). No mention often of any star ratings, and age suitability rating in the description. Let alone genre if the short description over runs by a bit too much. They certainly don't give the season episode number of the show, and if they do its at the cost of another piece of meta-data
Plus the quality and/or amount of meta-data can frequently change, thus leading to me needing during the past before JRiver, when on open source to subscribe to an xmltv epg provider. As their data was extremely substantially better, detailed, stable and in time was really up to date.
I verified this by speaking with another family member who has their own receiver, and they told me it is the same as it was several years ago. Before I became a customer of JRiver.
I know of Perc Data however they don't provide, their service outside of the United States/Canada. I tried to get them interested in providing it to United Kingdom, or Europe. However they said that they don't have the infrastructure for delivering the JSON feed required, and also couldn't afford the data from Gracenote. However I'm now wondering whether the people power of JRiver's customers outside, of those two countries could help to provide those funds.
Please answer these questions:-
- What services are available in the United Kingdom for detailed meta-data to the standard provided by Gracenote?
- What are you doing to obtain the xmltv format electronic program guide data?
- Would you subscribe to Perc Data if they expanded beyond their US/Canada market?
Thanks for your help in this.
