Once upon a time, if you wanted to know what was going to be on television, you had two choices. For that day, you could look in a daily paper. But if you wanted to know what was on in the forthcoming week, you had to buy two magazines: Radio Times for BBC1 and BBC2, and TV Times for ITV and then Channel 4. The data was effectively copyright, and with bestselling magazines to protect, there was no incentive for change.
Time Out forced a change in things when it led a campaign to free up listings information, and from the early nineties onwards, we’ve had a variety of choices about where we get our listings information from – not least the many newspaper supplements. Publications had to pay a licence fee, and a company called Broadcasting Dataservices is still the organisation that publications have to deal with if they want to publish that data.
Of course we’re now in the 21st century and a lot of TV companies, not least the BBC, realise that with the multiplicity of channels that are now available in the average home, getting the information about what programmes you have coming up out there is probably not a bad idea. The BBC publishes its listings via the Backstage website which can be used for various non-commercial purposes.
The point is that with lots of channels competing for diminishing numbers of viewers, locking that data up seems to be a particularly stupid thing to do.
Now of course most channels have their own websites these days, so surely it’s a simple matter of visiting said sites to find out what’s on? Up to a point Lord Copper:
1) There are many many channels, so that’s an awful lot of surfing to find out what’s on telly tonight.
2) Many TV channel sites are rubbish. It’s actually hard to find the listings info, and then when you do, it’s slow to load and is often limited only to the channels provided by that company.
There are alternatives. The Radio Times website does the job with most channels listed, but it has to make its money via ads, so there’s not a great deal of data on any given page as more clicks equals more page views.
The there’s the paid-for product Digiguide. This is actually really good. It’s endlessly customisable with lots of channels to choose from. I’ve been a subscriber for a number of years now. The only problem is that one subscription entitles you to one install at a time (as far as I know), and although they do have a web product, the main software is a standalone application.
So Bleb has been my “at work” default for quite a while now. It loads really quickly because there’s no superfluous advertising, with just a couple of Google ads for server costs. And it’s customisable so you can display just the information or channels you want very quickly.
Sadly, Broadcasting Data Services have come along and asked the site’s owner to remove ITV and BBC data. And it does seem that they’re correct in law. But how long is such a situation sustainable for? TV companies spend a lot of money promoting their programmes. They want the public to know when their shows are on. If we don’t we won’t watch them. Long gone are the days when we’d flick through the four available channels to find something to watch.
So if I was ITV, I’d be handing my programming data over free of charge to anyone and everyone who wanted it.
There is still money to be made from listings magazines and websites, but actually it should really be the other way around. TV companies should be paying sites like Bleb to include their listings!
Overall, moves like this make me even less likely to watch ITV than before. It simply drops off my repetoire of channels that I’m likely to watch (OK – there are one or two football matches I’ll be watching shortly). Is that the intended outcome?