Digital Technology for Digital Living.
April 15, 2005
Electronic Program Guide Comes To Australia (Finally).
You’ll remember that we posted about IceTV last year. Well it seems that they’ve launched their service in Melbourne and Sydney.
iceguide is the first of many ice services which make TV viewing a more user-friendly experience.
iceguide provides an on-screen TV guide that shows you what is on for the coming week on all free-to-air channels.
iceguide works with digital set-top-boxes, personal video recorders, or media centre computers. It is an electronic program guide that allows you to schedule recordings by simply highlighting the names of the programs you want to record and clicking your remote control.
It is an inexpensive subscription service that can be delivered to your home via the Internet.
Not exactly the service they talked about launching last year, but still, nice and compelling for those that want or have a Topfield TF5000PVRt (IG4TF), Showshifter (IG4SS), MythTV (IG4MT), or other PC-based PVR (IGXML). A 12 month subscription costs $156, or as the image suggests, a special bundle for $1099 to include the TF5000PVRt, which usually lists around that price.
Gadgetman | | PVR
April 16th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
$156!!!!
$156!!!!
Jeez - I think we need another court case to overturn the ridiculous proposition that a television station’s programme guide is copyright. This is the only reason there is no cheap/free computer readable TV guides in this country.
April 19th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
See http://www.tvguide.org.au/ for a community driven one.
April 25th, 2005 at 9:08 am
If you have a Toppy, there are also (free) alternatives to upload EPG data from the internet to your box. The Topfield-Australia forums have some info on doing this.
May 12th, 2005 at 8:15 am
Whatever happened to XML? “All data will be in XML within a few years, allowing web applications and agents to flourish”. You would have imagined that TV statiosn would WANT people to be able to easily watch their programs. This XML-enabled future was obviously from some lefty tree hugging parallel universe that never happened, we ended up in the universe with the “dog eat dog eat cash” free-market economy!
November 13th, 2005 at 5:25 pm
Ha ha, I found these postings whilst googling for RSS versions of TV guides. I want them to display on my site for convenience. So far I have only got ABC, the others do seem to behave there is some kind of capitalist value in them. If only the ratings agencies stopped lying to the networks and told them that we actually don’t watch the Logies and we wouldn’t read TV Week if it was delivered free to our front door. Maybe I should start charging $100/month subsription to read my crappy blog.