For about a year I've been going through the process of gathering all of the television listing pages from the New York Times, processing them to extract the films that played each day, matched the films to their IMDB links, and parsing the VCR codes to get the time/channel as well. Now I'm creating a little frontend to view and analyze the data as well as curate bits that didn't match properly.

At the moment I'm mostly just planning on sharing it with my brother, but who knows. I generally think I'll eventually share the data somewhere possibly on a website. I can't commercialise it if I understand the New York Times license properly since I scraped the Timesmachine for the listing pages.

Regardless, it's been super fun, and the data is very cool. Like 21 thousand unique films. At the moment I'm mostly trying to decide if I want to continue adding bits, like seeing all the listings a specific actor was in ... Mostly to test the hypothesis purported by PCU that there is always a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman film on television (I'm joking obviously there isn't although it is closer than you'd think). At the moment you can view an individual date or all of the listings for a specific film.

To me this is starting to feel almost like a Wikipedia thing or internet archive. This is, in a way, a specific ground truth of when television programs played in the New York area. I just have no idea who or what would be interested in it.