Any sample television databases out there?

Question

I am building a small front-end for a television client. I know the basic database structure but do not want to spend manually inserting all the channel names and show names and timings into the database. Are there any sample databases that I can just use? For instance, I am looking for a database containing tv related information with a set of channels, with their logos and perhaps the shows that are being aired on these channels.

Answer 1

Take a look at TVRage.com. They have various feeds that might be useful to you. It's not complete by any means. I'm assuming you just want this for development and debugging?

The BBC has an API.

Answer 2

I remember being there myself...

When I used to work for a start-up compressing and transforming TV Guides for broadcast on the Mobile TV, we relied heavily on the 7 days of programs provided by the BBC in the TV-Anytime format: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/7DayListingData?v=16wk

The BBC data is updated every day and it was the most complete source of TV programs available for free (for non-commercial use) at that time (2005-2007).

Some of our customers used data from the XML TV project (which comes from what I heard, from scrapping TV Guides from HTML pages of broadcasters...). It seems from the documentation that you need to install and run the software on your own PC to get data feeds.