After my absence, I thought I’d come back with something quick and fun – the result of half an hour’s playing with a new (to me) API.
The problem that I wanted to look into was: What programme was on TV on a given channel at a given time?
And how can I find this out programmatically?
The first thing that I came across was the getProgrammes service in the beta BBC Web API.
As I expect from the forward-thinking BBC, it’s pretty awesome: a simple API that gives you an XML document containing the programmes schedule for the specified time window.
The documentation on the BBC site is pretty self-explanatory. It gives all the information you need to start playing with the API – either using the form on the BBC page, or by sending it a few requests using wget.