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May 26, 2012

Zap2it Labs will discontinue free TV listings in September

by Brad Linder, posted Jun 20th 2007 10:04PM

Zap2it labsZap2it Labs has announced that it will no longer offer free television listings after September 1st. You may be wondering what the big deal is. After all, there are a million web sites where you can get your TV guide data.

But Zap2it Labs provided listings in an easily indexable formula, making it the program guide data source of choice for MythTV, GB-PVR, and Media Portal. These programs are also capable of handling XMLTV data, but there aren't really any good programs right now for scraping program guide data for U.S. television listings. We can probably expect to see that change in the very near future.

There's an active discussion taking place in the GB-PVR forums about alternative data sources, such as Yahoo! TV or TitanTV. But GB-PVR's lead developer says he doesn't have plans to design a program to scrape the data. Rather he suspects the much larger developer community working on MythTV will lead the way.

[via Brent Evans]

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David

If you are looking for a web-based TV guide, take a look at couchville.com. It does not appear to be a compatible replacement for scraping, but it is up-to-date within hours of Cox cable line-up.

July 08 2007 at 11:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
topmoo

Will this effect media center? That is where their info comes from as well.

June 21 2007 at 2:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tammy

I used to like their site ... The most recent changes make it horrible & not exactly easy to use. But, it was still better than TvGuide.com (esp since stupid Comcast moved the TvGuide channel to digital cable & some of us still only have analog).

I need a new tv listing site ...

June 21 2007 at 1:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MegaZone

Bad news spreads fast - I saw it mentioned on USENet and just posted about it in TiVo Lovers too. I can't blame TMS/Zap2It for this at all, I've been saying this would happen if people kept abusing their service.

XMLTV just used the free feed, so that won't work. The old scraper code won't work anymore, the site is radically different. Someone would need to write a new scraper - and I won't be surprised if Zap2It plays with their site to help defeat them since they aren't going to want to keep feeding the leeches with even more server load.

Scrapers will need to abide by the policies of the various sites, or they'll get locked out.

June 21 2007 at 1:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply

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