au_xmltvgen_austext will definitely stop working forever on September 30th, 2009

I have discovered that AUSTEXT is shutting down on September 30th, 2009. Presently, the only over-the-air program guide over DVB-T (terrestrial digital television) appears to be very crippled, only showing the current and next program (when it could show a whole lot more). Seems that some television stations still aren’t learning from their past mistakes about electronic programme guides.

Channel 7 cite the increasing availability of the information over the internet and their website (Yahoo!7) as a reason for terminating the AUSTEXT service.

As a result, au\_xmltvgen\_austext will definitely stop working at that time, forever.

The page will stay up for posterity’s sake as I believe I took the cake for the most inventive way to get TV-guides into a computer-readable format, and it was a interesting learning experience as my first Python script. :)