Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Zap2It Free TV Listings Discontinued On September 1st


Zap2It has announced that they will no longer offer their free TV listings service to hobbyists for their own personal, noncommercial use. They blame the misuse of the Zap2it Labs data as well as business factors for the decision to discontinue Zap2itLabs effective September 1, 2007.



This is bad news for those HTPC users who use the xmltv importer and zap2it for listings imported into their HTPC programs like MythTV, GBPVR and MediaPortal all use zap2it for their listings.
I should note that it has been confirmed by Snapstream & SageTV on their respective forums that BeyondTV users who use the BeyondTV guide feed will NOT be affected, as Beyond TV and SageTV both use the paid tvguide service for their built-in tv guide information. The Beyond TV & SageTV users who use the alternative XMLTV & Zap2it for their guides however will be affected by this.
It is likely that someone will come up with some sort of screen-scraper add-on that will take the place of zap2it - hopefully by the time September 1st comes around. Either way, it would make me nervous if I were relying on it for my TV Guide on my PVR.