Hi Jan and David,
Wow, thanks so much for starting TVMaze. Your efforts are greatly appreciated!
I’m a freelance developer from the Netherlands. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a couple of colleagues about completely missing a new season of one of our favorite TV-shows. None of us really knew when a new season of one of our shows really aired. Being designers and developers, we wanted to make a website to tackle this.
We found a few API’s to help us with the data part; this is where the troubles started. From the API we need the series-id, season number, episode number, and airdate.
At first the OMdb API didn’t do much for our cause, since we could only load data about a single episode of a show.
Then we found the TMdb, it seemed to be just what we needed. But after a few test rounds, it was very slow. A few requests took up to 30 seconds.
The TVdb was our next find. Their xml-file data-structure was quite fast and we were happy with their update function. This was until we noticed that newly announced episodes weren’t part of the update sequence. This function would be added to v2 of the API, with an ETA of Soon™.
We almost gave up our search. Maybe this was the reason our imagined system didn’t exist yet. At this moment I stumbled upon the TVMaze. The database and API development looks very transparent and fast. Also, the API has an update system that will be perfect for our system. Your quick response times and actions are also very impressive!
Since our previous experiences we are a little careful though. So before fully engaging with the TVMaze API, we have a few questions. On the forums we read the post about the ambition to recover the TVRage database, this is very noble. How long are you planning to develop and update the API and the database? We couldn’t really find this info on the site.
Thanks in advance!
Kind regards,
Jaap Redeker
