Our Free*EPG and ozTiVo Microsoft Windows Guide Service feeds for Australia will be discontinued from Sunday, 20th October 2008.
- We recommend all users start using our XMLTV: Guide Pack
as soon as possible to avoid delays in guide updates.What happened?
- The same 'ole story: 10,000 Free*EPG subscribers, but less than 1% of ever donated for time and materials over a 2 year period ...
Kinda depressing when you think about it, but to the 0.85% that did make donations, "THANK YOU!". 
Your contributions kept us fuelled up with pizza and kept us (mostly) out of the red when our bills arrived!Well, we've been running this little dog and pony show since 2006. In that time we've made a lot of friends, been abused by a few tossers, and been part of a great community base, but during the past two years we've always been struggling to find funding and time to work on epgStream.net. After we hit the magical 10,000 user mark a few weeks back we realised that the amount of work and user support wasn't going to get any easier, so we had to make a decision!
Unfortunately we can't run this as a free service forever so we decided that it's almost time for the Free*EPG Team to move on to our next project ...
We all knew this day would eventually come and, if you hadn't noticed, we've slowly been winding down our operations. Rather than leave all our subscribers high-and-dry, our exit strategy was to modify and release our Free*EPG server software as a client-based tool kit. The XMLTV: Guide Pack
now contains tools and services that we've been working on over the past 6 months to allow users to access XMLTV and Windows Media Center EPG data, independantly of our epgStream.net servers.Can I still download guide data for my Media Center installation?
- YES! Our XMLTV: Guide Pack
will now replace our Free*EPG service and allow you to download XMLTV data or load guide data directly into Windows Media Center. This client-based application distributes the overhead of guide processing to individual users and provides a simple to use wizard interface to configure all aspects of your guide. Is the "XMLTV: Guide Pack" easy to use?
- YES! We've done our best to provide a simple to use Guide Wizard interface which allows you to simply pick your region and go from there!
If you are still having problems then you can view our video tutorials available from our website or visit our support forum, http://forum.epgstream.net.More technical users have the option of drilling down into the guts of the XMLTV: Guide Pack
to access advanced configuration settings and features.How long will the "XMLTV: Guide Pack" be supported?
- Don't worry, it's only our Free*EPG service that's being discontinued, not our whole epgStream.net website. As long as we have active feedback and support from people who use our software then we'll be around to make enhancements (now that we're gonna have heaps of spare time)!
The XMLTV: Guide Pack
is much, much, much easier to support than our existing Free*EPG service. Basically the XMLTV: Guide Pack takes care of itself and you ... But if you have any problems with the software or the guide data for your region, then please visit our XMLTV: Guide Pack support forum here: If you don't tell us about the problem then we can't help you!
Thanks,
