RSS Feed for Television Listings?

June 13, 2005 8:28 PM

Does anyone know of a site with an RSS/XML feed for television listings? In particular, I'd love to find one that I could customize to my favorite channels. I'd also like to find something that would give me the day's listings for a particular genre (such all the movies or sporting events on that day). I've found a site that allows you to get feeds for all the day's listings for specific cable channels (a feed for CNN, a feed for TNT, etc.), but the networks are excluded from this, and I'd like to get a feed that would also tell me what's on the regular networks in the evening.
posted by roundrock to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Most people use Zap2IT Data Direct, which provides an XML feed . You need to do a survey every 3 months to keep your account though. I don't know how well-formatted the data is, but XMLTV (a tool for converting various TV feeds into a standard format) supports it as a backend.
posted by abcde at 1:48 AM on June 14, 2005

Don't know what your system is, but on Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") there are widgets that retrieve TV schedules.

I have no idea how they work, although I think that they're HTML/Javascript. Perhaps this can be interpreted/translated by an RSS reader?
posted by Chunder at 2:52 AM on June 14, 2005

Yahoo! TV lets you create a TV schedule of your favorite channels and add it to your My Yahoo! portal for free, but I can't seem to find an RSS feed for it. I'd be interested in an RSS feed for TV a customised TV schedule too, though.
posted by geeky at 5:49 AM on June 14, 2005

Response by poster: hmmm - i signed up for zap2it data direct and chose all my desired listings, but then it turns out you have to do some techy computer programming type stuff to be able to get an actual feed (and then you have to go back into the script regularly to make sure the downloads continue). I am normally reasonably adept at figuring things out with basic instructions, but the explanations in zap2it's forums were in a language I simply could not understand (perl, java, soap-something-or-other, write-your-own-code -- no thanks!). Anyone know of any other sites with a more user-friendly way of getting feeds for tv listings?
posted by roundrock at 9:51 PM on June 15, 2005

Bootleg RSS: TV Edition - I haven't used it, but Popular Science recommends it (right column).
posted by exhilaration at 9:23 AM on June 16, 2005

Response by poster: thanks, exhilaration! that is indeed a great feed - it's actually one I did know about ... you can get feeds for cable television listings, but you can't get the regular ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX listings. I was hoping to find one that would let me get those regular channels, too.
posted by roundrock at 9:56 AM on June 18, 2005