I'm down with the $5.

Huh, interesting. Did anything actually come of it, or did they just end up providing custom themes? Maybe they had the right idea but started off with the wrong focus.

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Nothing came of it, not enough subscribers.

I absolutely would pay $5/month. The freedom that MythTV brings to my lifestyle EASILY offsets that small amount of money.

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Too lazy to update this with my current hardware, I'll redo it during my next install =)

Someone on the mythtv-users list mentioned that TMS sells the data for the entire US market for $12,000 a month. So basically you would need almost 2500 people at $5 a month just to cover that, not to mention the bandwidth required. We also don't know what restrictions TMS puts on redistributing that data.

Has anyone heard any estimates on how many MythTV users there are in the US? I'm guessing we would need at least 3000 subscribers for the dollars and cents to work out.

From this forum only...

Yeah, but this only affects people in the US. That number includes worldwide users. It is a pretty big number though.

Geesh, I just can't win. Two weeks ago my machine crapped out and now this happens.

I came onto the scene after the switch to Zap2It, how bad was the old way?

The old way worked but it would take almost an hour to get channel data for 50 channels for a 2 week period with all the screen scrapping.

Also when zap2it changed there web page layout and it would break the grabber and your listing would not be updated until the grabber was updated and you applied the update to your system.

This was a big pain and if you didn't notice the problem you might miss a few shows before you applied the fix.

I'd be ok with a 1-2 hour window to get program listing for each 2 week period if it could be scheduled for some strange hour that I'm not actually watching tv.

ugh... this is bad news. does anyone know where zap2it got the listings? do they get a feed from each US station then pull it together and assign it a market? is there any way we could get a hold of the data that feeds their listing? a DIY approach?

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Apparently, the MythTV devs are working on this.... http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/m ... 533#275533

Obviously - this really worries me. I've been using zap2it for about 2 years.

But I personally think that $5/month is too much. I'd probably agree to pay - but $5 is almost 10% of my sat bill...

I think the developers of MythTV have known for quite awhile that zap2it was going to discontinue the service. I would bet they already have a replacement option in the works. Too bad some people probably abused the zap2it system and people like us or were using it legitimately have to suffer but that's the internet for you.

I still can't figure this part out: what were people doing that was infringing, and that made Zap2It pull the plug?

It's not Mythic/Human selling Dragons... he's already said that he cleared how his systems were set up with Zap2It (requiring the purchaser to set up their Zap2It account).

Even if there were groups out there selling custom-configured MythTV systems, they should have been easy enough to spot and to send a cease-and-desist to. And I can't imagine these groups were selling enough systems to be a significant problem.

Were people out there mirroring the data so that others didn't have to register? Were newspapers in small towns setting up a MythTV system just to "steal" the listings and publish them in the paper without having to pay a commercial subscription?