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They should contact Amazon to rescue them (like Imdb). The costs involved are a rounding error in one of Amazon's (or any other big tech company) tiny projects that never get finished, so its essentially free. e.g. I would be happy to see a 'Tvdb powered by Amazon' logo if it meant rescuing the site.
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If the costs are on the order of 1k a month then it's doable by the wider community to fund it.
I'm sure a bunch of folk here would be happy to contribute $5-10 a month and you don't need many such on going contributions to break even.
Will email Scott and see whether there's anything XBMC can do to help.
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How about they stop hosting images and off load that to someone else such as fanart.tv this would help reduce the amount of data they chew through each month..
i.e focus on what you do well... not what others can / are already doing better.
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Not quite what I meant Martijn, I'm well aware of the troubles recently faced by fanart.tv.
Fanart.tv is a great site and already covers the graphics aspect very well.. I just don't see why thetvdb.com site needs to supply / host images if someone else is already doing it better.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a competetive thing as you both serve different information primarily but if the business is in trouble you have to look at how you can remain viable.. this is just one thing I can see that could keep it afloat for now.
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2012-08-26, 05:16
(This post was last modified: 2012-08-26, 05:17 by Martijn.)
We both provide different images so there is no competition.
Besides that tvdb started way earlier with images.
Maybe we could host them however that would mean we need a larger server and way more bandwidth which don't have and can't afford
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Indeed, that is just moving the maintenance costs onto another community site.
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EMK0
Senior Member
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I think you guys should do more with the site currently i don't even go to it as xbmc just does its thing.
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Kode
fanart.tv admin
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I've posted on their thread, I'm not adverse to hosting the images instead, but they would have to go through the same quality control process all other images do, that would massively drop their bandwidth needs, wether they go for it or not is another matter.
Get and request your ClearLOGOs / ClearART / TV Thumbs / Season Thumbs / Music ClearLOGOs / cdART / Artist Backgrounds / CD Covers from
fanart.tv
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K405
Junior Member
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I donated yesterday without knowing there's possible danger ahead. Hopefully they'll manage to sort things out.
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2012-08-29, 17:50
(This post was last modified: 2012-08-29, 17:54 by Martijn.)
Indeed, that is just moving the maintenance costs onto another community site.
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XBMC should force users of thetvdb data to view a certain amount of advertising per month until costs for thetvdb are covered. EMK0 is right in that thetvdb and XBMC are actually a bad match if costs need to be supported by web-based ad revenue. Most people don't actually visit thetvdb.com, they just point their XBMC to it and off they go.
Whilst most people would not like to see ads forced on to them by XBMC, hopefully the number of XBMC users worldwide would mean that only a few minutes of ads a month, per user, would need to be displayed. Of course this could be done only on the home screen so that it would not interrupt or prevent movies. I am not suggesting the way YouTube does it, where they show a commercial before the actual video, perhaps allowing you to skip the rest of that commercial about one third of the way in. I'm talking about relatively small banner ads under the main menu in the Confluence skin, for example. This space is not currently used so it's not as if there would be any blockage.
Personally I think it would be a tragedy to go back to scraping websites.