On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 12:42:16AM -0800, Bruce Markey wrote: > Brad Templeton wrote: > ... > >So, anybody speculate when they will decide to start charging? > > TMS, Gemstar and the like don't create TV listing information. > They gather it from TV stations and networks. TV stations make > money by selling commercial time with the rates based on Nielsen > ratings. Stations need to let viewers know when their shows are > on so that people will watch. The purpose of listings services > is to distribute the stations listings for the benefit of the > stations. If the service didn't deliver listings to potential > viewers, the stations would take their business to someone else > who would. In this sense, their business is somewhat like the junk > mail with all the retail and grocery store adds. There is no need > to worry that you will be charged to receive these coupons.
But this business unit is not in the business of giving it away. I presume they do some cleanup and unification of the data as well, but that can be fixed other ways. Fact is they _do_ charge companies for this data and that is the lifeblood of this business unit. And the stations have very little interest in providing accurate listing data to people who don't watch their commercials. Myth users are worse than Tivo users as they have automatic commercial skip. > DataDirect is a Good Thing for us so it is easy to jump to the > conclusion that there's got to be a catch and they're out to > screw us somehow. However, TMS actually pushed for and created > DD for their own selfish benefit. They cut down the web scraping, but in fact there are other ways to stop web scraping. They would rather not do the, and myth users are small in number now anyway. > > If they tried to charge for this service, people would simply > go back to scraping. Their webservers would be bombarded and > they would lose their source for demographic information. Actually, I would pay a modest fee rather than scrape. Just to assure the data is reliable. With scraping you would fear the data could vanish any day that they happen to change the format of their web page. Companies like Tivo pay because even if they could scrape (the copyright rules are dicey on this) they don't want to be in a position of having it go out due to factors beyond their control.
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