Feed My Tv is a new service that makes sure your television is supplied with great programming you'll love.

As part of making fetching television from the internet simpler, it is important that the dull details are handled for you, quietly and behind the scenes.

This site – lookup.feedmytv.com – is a simple Web service which enables client software to automatically find locations on the internet where the programming they are interested may be found. This is mainly of interest to developers, not end users. We're publishing this information here because it isn't available in a very nicely structured way elsewhere. The more publishers of information like this, the better, especially if we use common formats.

All of this is still experimental, so get in touch (with Ashok, for now) if you want to shape how this develops, and even more so if you start using this service in anger. Mailing lists and all that will follow as soon as there's a first version of a callable service.

Instructions will follow in short order. Basically there are three operations:

find

find programmes that match a particular search. The most common case is to turn a well-known URI for a piece of content into the list of all the places you can get it. You can also restrict to other features you need, for example by video codec, filetype or the presence or absence of particular DRM.

add

contribute some meta-data to the site about a particular encoding of a file that is at a particular location online.

rate

a very simple approach to disagree or agree with meta-data on the site. We're starting very simple here, but we may well need a proper reputation system in the future.

In the future, we'll also add something like:

source

tell us how to pull apart the information posted elsewhere and we will include that in the information we routinely spider.