Work, travel, babies, marriages, puppies and illness! It’s been a heck of a few months for us here at epgStream, but it looks like September sees our calendar clearing!

Yup, it looks like there is a good chance things will be settling down and we’ll be able to pick up on our hobby projects this coming September/October! This is great because it gives us a chance to unwind and also to crank up epgStream.net.

Bigger news (incase you haven’t already heard on the grapevine) is that we’ve been approached by a third party who has expressed interest in purchasing our client/server software solutions. This could present quite an interesting scenario having a full-time business entity take over development and support of our EPG products!!!

Network Ten will launch ONE on 26 March 2009. This exciting new sports channel  will be viewable on Ch1 and Ch11 on high definition receivers.

Australia’s Network Ten have finally announced their ONE HD launch date with this message in their broadcast EIT data on channels 1 and 11. ONE HD will attempt to compete with Fox Sports and other free-to-air sporting shows by providing high quality, high definition coverage of Australian local sports.

This will be great new for sports fans as more and more sporting events wil be broadcast, but sci-fi and documentary lovers won’t miss out. High definition channel 12 will still be available for the all existing, non-sport based content so it should be business as usual! 

Hopefully with this big sports programming hole to fill we’ll all start to see some of the less popular sports being broadcast. I mean there’s nothing nicer than settling down on a sunday morning to watch cheese rolling …

Simply use the “santascoming” discount code when purchasing a 12 month IceTV subscription to receive the discount. Full instructions on how to use the discount code can be found on our news page.

This offer is available for the first 500 customers or until midnight, 31 December 2008.

We value our existing subscribers—if you have the yearly ‘auto-renew’ option selected you will receive the discounted $49 price automatically, if your account renews before 31 December 2008. Existing customers can also top-up their accounts for the discounted price. So don’t worry, you won’t miss out on the savings!

The Nine Network today won their appeal against last year’s decision in favour of IceTV.

Three Federal Court judges ruled that IceTV did breach the Nine Network’s copyright in its weekly program guide.

The exact implication for IceTV will be decided when the matter is remitted to the primary Judge, Annabelle Bennett. However IceTV have been ordered to pay Nine’s costs which could run into millions. Nine are also seeking damages, although these will be hard to prove.

Judges Black, Lindgren and Sackville ruled that Judge Bennett had erred on several crucial points. The full judgment can be read here.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2008/71.html

Vogel Ross. (2008, May 8). Titanic Sinks Iceberg. Retrieved May 8, 2008, from http://vogelross.com.au/vrblog/?p=18

 “The xmlguide.pl service will be discontinued on March 31, 2008. Please ask the author of your XML data grabber to update it to use the new API. Details can be found at http://minnie.tuhs.org/xmltv/api.html (MA)”

The above message has been haunting ozTiVo.net users and downstream guide providers for weeks now … and finally today it was replaced with: 

“The requested URL /tivo-bin/xmlguide.pl was not found on this server.”

A sad, sad day for many ozTiVo.net users when they go to download their daily dose of XMLTV data only to find their favourite guide service has been upgraded! If users are lucky enough then their local Media Center software has also been upgraded to handle the new guide request API … Otherwise it’ll be a busy day on the forums today!

Inconvenience aside, this new guide request API does have quite a few benefits. Users will gain more flexibility when it comes to selecting the amount of data to download, and ozTiVo.net’s servers can optimise the guide requests to reduce bandwidth and server processing loads. Check out this link if you are thinking of developing your own grabber …

Microsoft Windows users can download our free xmltvDownload application from this thread which will allow them download their XMLTV data directly from ozTiVo.net.

Originally Posted by forums@icetv.com.au

As part of our ongoing commitment to bringing new & exciting features to IceTV users in order to get the most out of your TV viewing experience, we are pleased to announce… IceTV Recommendations.

Now not only can you see what are the most popular shows on TV, you can also get a list of shows recommended to you based on your’s and other’s TV viewing habits. A list of IceTV Recommendations can now be found under the “Recommended” tab of the I Watch This website (http://iwatchthis.com.au/recommended) and will also soon be made available in the new-look IceTV Widget, once you have visited that page the recommendations will also show up under your “My Upcoming Shows” page (http://iwatchthis.com.au/myupcomingshows) allowing easy scheduling.

Please note if you do not use IceTV Remote or have never setup favorites under IceTV Remote or I Watch This you will not get any recommendations.

As this is a new system we are looking for any feedback that you have regarding how well the recommendations work for you. Please leave any feedback at http://www.icetv.com.au/iceforum/index.php?topic=991.0.

To unsubscribe from these announcements, login to the forum and uncheck “Receive forum announcements and important notifications by email.” in your profile.

You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://www.icetv.com.au/iceforum/index.php?topic=992.0

Regards,
The IceTV Forum Team.

This information can be the stepping stone to a tradable commodity. Make sure some sort of compensation (no matter how small) is coming your way. This type of information, in it’s current state, is similar to a subset of Roy Morgan Research data sold.

Check out a previous dialogue I had with IceTV on privacy and data aggregation here.

While the outcome will be quite interesting in terms of copyright law as it applies to television schedules, it will have a particularly significant impact on IceTV as it is likely to dictate whether Nine will have to pay IceTV’s costs of defending the matter.

source: Vogel Ross Blog

On 11 February ABC TV will reset the numbering for our channels on the free-to-air digital platform, so as to make them more logical for viewers.

All epgStream.net users will notice the following changes in their existing channel names:

•  “ABC TV” now becomes “ABC1″
• “ABC2″ remains unchanged.
• “ABC HDTV” now becomes “ABC1 HD”

Windows Media Center Users

Users will have to perform a manual “Add Listing to Channel” to associate the new ABC1 and ABC2 listings to their respective digital channels. Additionally, all existing scheduled recordings for ABC channels may have to be re-programmed.

XMLTV Users

Users will may notice that the channel identifiers for ABC1 and ABC2 have been swapped around. This may result in ABC1 listings being displayed in ABC2 and vice-versa, so channel re-mapping may be required.

Source References

• http://www.abc.net.au/reception/
• http://www.abc.net.au/tv/newtv/on_your_tv.htm

“SBS Digital” will become “SBS 2“.
“SBS Digital 1” will become “SBS“.
“SBS Digital 2” will become “SBS News“.
“SBS HD” will remain unchanged.

Our guide channel data will be updated accordingly and be available for download from 11:30am Monday, 4th June 2007.

What does this mean for you? Unfortunately you’ll have to re-scan your channels again using the Guide Setup option within Media Center. You also may have to re-program recording schedules for SBS programme series you are currently recording (e.g. South Park, MythBusters, etc).

So is there any good news at all? Those users who are finding their Media Center SBS channels disappearing may be pleasantly surprised …

http://www20.sbs.com.au/transmissions/

Excuse the poor quality of the graphs as they are pretty adhoc, but along the x-Axis you can see the TV Show being broadcast and along the y-Axis you can see the % of Airtime. The % of Airtime simply indicates out of the 6,000 or so airtime hours (about 39 weeks) sampled per channel in Sydney, what percentage of it was filled by that TV Show. Only those TV Shows that consumed at least 0.75% of airtime have been shown in these graphs.

As a rough guide, about 1% is equal to 65 hours, so we can derive some interesting observations …

• SBS shows a lot of news!
• ABC plays a lot of Play School … Almost an average of an hour per day between ABC and ABC2!
• Network TEN seems to show twice as much regional news as Seven or Nine!
• Oprah gets slightly more airtime than Dr. Phil!
• Network Ten gives us an average of about 30 minutes a day of The Simpsons!
• Channel Nine gives us an average of about an hour a day of Kerri-Anne!
• Channel Seven play a lot of old stuff … Sons & Daughters, Rafferty’s Rules, M*A*S*H, Blue Heelers, etc
• Ready Steady Cook consumes more airtime than A Current Affair or Today Tonight!

Remember this is a very general analysis … Just wait until you see the Weekday vs Weekend , Australian vs Overseas , Peak vs Off-peak, New vs Old, etc content. It’s really nerdy stuff but interesting to see what is being force fed (and when) down the viewers willing throat!

Make sure you put in a sensible comment and voice your opinion! Our current 1,627 signatures only represents a minority of Australian EPG market … We should be looking at at least 10,000 signatures by now!

Sign the petition now … http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/EPG_OZ/
Original forum thread … Australian EPG petition. Have your say!!

To continue to provide our high level of telephone support to our rapidly growing customer base, IceTV is looking for relief staff to provide 10 hours/week (initially) telephone and email support. Hours will include evenings or weekends.

The ideal candidate will be familiar with IceTV’s products and be able to troubleshoot operation on popular platforms such as Microsoft Media Centre and Topfield PVRs.

Ability to attend the North Sydney office regularly is essential. Please send applications to support@icetv.com.au.

To unsubscribe from these announcements, login to the forum and uncheck “Receive forum announcements and important notifications by email.” in your profile.

You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://www.icetv.com.au/iceforum/index.php?topic=417.0

Regards,
The IceTV Forum Team.

Looks pretty good and doesn’t pay that bad either! We might have to get some part-time work out of these guys!