Christian,
Option 1 could be attempted, but I fear it would be fruitless. Option 2
is not an option, as I will explain below. Options 3 is our best option,
but this should be a joined operation. As far as I can see, I am
currently the only one. So if anybody is there, please give a howler.
Now I will explain the problem with option 2. For that we need to go
back 30-odd years, the time before the internet. In the Netherlands, the
problem is the existence of the public (as in non-commercial) tv
broadcast organisations who shared 2 (later 3) channels. There were no
commercial channels and everybody bought a paper tv guide. Every
organisation published his/her own tv guide. When you bought one, you
were automatically a member of an organisation. The advertising income
was divided over the organisations by ratio of members. So in short: tv
guide data equals money.
This antiquated system is still operational and is limiting the amount
of sources. The rules state that only the tv guide data of today and
tomorrow may be distributed freely. By my knowledge there are only three
internet sources that serves more than 2 days of tv guide data:
- tvgids.nl: This is the site we used and recently implemented a user
agent string filter.
- omroep.nl: Any user agent string other than the normal ones is used, a
message is displayed explaining that you may not grab, spider or
otherwise process their data.
- rtl.nl: This site uses a mixture of javascript and flash, that is so
obfuscated, that it is clear that they do not want anything to happen to
their data.
Currently the sale of paper tv guides is disastrously low, making the
system completely unworkable, but the politics have not yet changed the
system.
My suggestion would be to use the Belgian grabber, for the time being
(which could be a very long while).
Christian Wattengård wrote:
> IMHO, this is a hint from the source that they do not want to be used for
> this.
> As I see it, there are three options:
> 1. Send a mail and ask for permission.
> 2. Get a new source.
> 3. Get together a team and setup a service like the Swedish, Croatian
> and Norwegian grabbers are using. I'm sure Mattias, Tomica and myself
> would be able to help out with the technical stuff. However, Mattias
> is the one with the big knowledge :)
> This would require some development skills, primarily in perl though.
> And a PR manager to address the channels separately, to get data. I do
> all of it myself, on my free time. So it is feasable.
>
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