In addition to the airdate and airtime for each episode it would be great to have the airdateutc which would be an ISO-8601 datetime that includes the air time in relation to UTC (this would be used to display a calendar of upcoming shows relevant to the user's actual timezone). I'd rather see a show airing at 6pm local time than to see 9pm and have to subtract 3 hours (from EST to PST), plus it gets a lot more complicated for people outside of North America.
You're right, we should include timezone information in the API.
I'm not sure what exactly you're proposing with "the air time in relation to UTC". There are two possibilities: we can either display the timestamp in UTC (e.g. a 0 offset to UTC), or we can display it in the episode's native timezone but include that timezone's offset to UTC. Any datetime library would be fine with either, any thoughts about pros and cons for other usecases?
We'll also have to keep the 'episodes airing after midnight' thing in mind. This UTC/8601 property would represent the technically correct date format, e.g. an episode airing at 1AM UTC in the night between January 1st and January 2nd, would get 2014-01-02T01:00:00Z as value (while that episode's airdate property on the site would be 2014-01-01).
Actually, with that in mind, I think I lean towards the second option: the timestamp in the episode's native format, but with the UTC offset included, like 2014-01-02T01:00+03:00. This would be suitable for input to a datetime library, as well as being a mostly human readable form of the episode's technically correct airdate.
Hey David, sorry I wasn't clear, in relation to UTC I did mean time zone information.
Either of those formats would give us the end result we desire, 8601 is what I'm more familiar with seeing, but the end result is the same and I do see the advantage to displaying the date as the original when giving it a quick glance.
I'm not sure if we understood each other completely, but I just finished this feature and I'm sure you'll be happy with it. For the details, check http://www.tvmaze.com/threads/4/api-changelog#61 :)
