Google TV EPG Provider

Question

I've been looking for a good service that provides electronic program guides (TV listings) for a program I've written. The problem is that most of the services I've found aren't especially accurate.

Currently I'm using trakt.tv which looks like it's powered by both tvrage and thetvdb. I've also used tvrage in the past but I've had too much trouble with uptime//inaccuracies with tvrage (and mostly only inaccuracies with trakt.tv).

I did some searching and found that MythTV's preferred EPG provider for Northern America is ScheduleDirect. The problem with ScheduleDirect is that the service isn't free and I'd rather not pay for something where I can't guaranty the accuracy of the service or that the service will be around for a reasonable amount of time in the future.

This brought me to my Google TV which allows you to set up a TV Provider where it will automatically retrieve and search through the electronic program guide and gives a pretty good interface for instructing your DVR to setup a recording schedule for a series or episode.

So what I was wondering is if anybody knew which provider(s) Google TV uses for EPG data. If there's not a good answer to this question I'm probably going to do some local network sniffing between my Google TV and router to see if I can discover the provider on my own.

Answer 1

It is very likely Tribune Media Services. That is where ScheduleDirect gets their data. Unless you are willing to screen-scrape sites like TVGuide (and probably violate their Terms of Service), then you are going to have to pay for the EPG data.

Google TV has an API for its Android apps to get access to the EPG data: http://code.google.com/tv/android/docs/gtv_provider.html

Answer 2

You should also try Rovi - most of the cable companies use it for TV listings and it now provides as API: http://developer.rovicorp.com/docs/?wikiPage=index.php/Listings