DMCM:

 

mattwnz:

 

Jaxson: Mysky is probably the closest alternative.

 

 

 

And ironically that is what the Tivo was marketed against. It was like Mysky, without having to pay the subscription. Interesting to read old articles about the service, and when TVNZ and Spark were involved, it looked like they were looking at getting advertisers involved to service on ongoing costs associated with the EPG etc. That was obviously big mistake they made, seling a product that requires that ongoing service in order to work. Where as the overseas Tivo is a lot cheaper to buy, but you pay a monthly subscription plus you get other paid content.

 

 

 

 

That's what I find hard to figure out - what would be the cost of maintaining an EPG?  What would you have?  A server with a web service or similar that picked up something maintained in a DB?  In terms of funding it, ff there were originally ~20K tivo users, and now there is maybe < 10, say 5K, and they paid $5 per month, then you have $25K to support it. 

 

I'm assuming my assumptions are way off - must be.

 

EPG is maintained for free for XMLTV users (ie mythtv, tvHeadend and similar projects). It is simply maintained by a guy who extracts the data from the publicly available sources (ie mheg) and makes it available in XMLTV format for the world to use. No doubt s/he has some cost, but chooses not to recoup it.

If someone knows how EPG data from Tivo is structured, and how to hack Tivo to get the data elsewhere, the raw data is certainly available for free.