AltEPG

it is just my nature ..

I don't know how the system works to create the altEPG, but it does seem to be fairly much dependant on peple doing it rather than automated ...

At the moment every is on a high, having shown the Baddies at Tivo Sky and Virgin that we don't need them .. but what happens further down the line when the adrenalyn is no longer coursing through the veins .. is the necesssary input going to be sustainable?

I'm not sure but I think a lot of it IS automated, the servers grab the data, the scripts turn it into useable TiVo data and then further scripts then load it on to the upload servers and then these wait to dish it out to eager awaiting TiVo's when they dial in

Apart from the first tweaking to get things to do it in the right order I suspect 99% is fully automated now ....... thats how I'd do it

Furbag

Once the system is up and settled I think the idea is to move to a more crowd sourced approach hen it comes to getting the niggly stuff exctl right.

Yes indeed. There's an awful lot of work behind the scenes needing constant checking and double-checking at the moment. Eg if there is a problem importing data, you DON'T want this data to continue on to tivo slices otherwise you'd hose everyone's TiVo on the next daily call! I don't think any of us want that . This is why it's still Alpha test.

There's no need to be pessimistic! Crowdsourcing will be really great. Again though there's some way to go before the TVGuide is ready to be hammered with lots of users. For now there's just a few of us, and the threads I've created for corrections are reasonably quiet (hope I don't jinx it by saying that!)

The Windows update we do at work are done to a few test servers and left running for a week before rolling out to the rest of the servers.

Would this not be possible with AltEPG? Currently we are all Alpha testers, but in the future there might be a need to have just a handful.

A few of us with second units receive and use rough data generated automatically and report / correct issues a few days before the masses?

In then end we'd have automatically generated slices that are given to a small bunch of alpha testers a week early and the masses receive the proven slices a week later (as long at there aren't issues).

Thing is, I haven't seen any issues yet. I'm a freeview user and I'm not looking for lots of data and therefore haven't seen any issues.

Yep, that's possible and in hand, as you say with more time that sort of thing is the way to go. I know that the Sky Radio lineup and TmsIds in Stations (required for channel moves and deletes to work) were tested on another platform before being rolled out to the main platform.