Please can someone help me understand more on how we populate/scrape TV events for sports fixtures? I’m particularly interested in UK events and have noticed over time how some fixtures on a specific date have the correct events and some have none. Even though it’s the same day and competition.
For example all games for the Carabao cup are on Sky Sports (mainly Sky Sports +) however about 3/4 have this event added and I’ve had to manually add the rest.
I’m happy to contribute to the scraper if it’s open source or help develop it further.
Thanks!
Posted: 26 Aug 2026 13:04
curswine
Edits: 1,133,455 Posts: 1,269 Joined: 2020
Hi,
It's impossible to tell what each individual user adds in terms of TV channels to events but I'm pretty sure I am responsible for most of it.
I have a scraper which I run daily that goes to sport-tv-guide.live and scrapes from a list of channels I have selected, then using the API it tries to lookup the events its scraped.
The missing instances could be down to the information either not being on STG, the script doesn't have any rate limiter so it regularly gets stopped once it makes 100 calls in a minute. I also have to maintain a list of team names to link the two websites, if one of those changes it could prevent the event getting found.
Feel free to help in any way you can.
Posted: 26 Aug 2026 19:51
Moonbags
Edits: 347 Posts: 46 Joined: 2021
Thanks for the context!
Have you heard of live-footballontv.com? Feels like a more intuitive site to use compared to sport-tv-guide. It’s also always up to date. But I appreciate that will be quite a big change to switch sources.
Feels like rate limiting might be the biggest factor at play here, team names shouldn’t change much? Maybe a 1 second wait between calls. That’s what I have in place when calling the API.
If you’d like me to help I’m happy to, is the repo hosted somewhere on git?
Also thanks for being the main source for adding channels!
Posted: 26 Aug 2026 20:00
curswine
Edits: 1,133,455 Posts: 1,269 Joined: 2020
Thanks for the context!
Have you heard of live-footballontv.com? Feels like a more intuitive site to use compared to sport-tv-guide. It’s also always up to date. But I appreciate that will be quite a big change to switch sources.
Feels like rate limiting might be the biggest factor at play here, team names shouldn’t change much? Maybe a 1 second wait between calls. That’s what I have in place when calling the API.
If you’d like me to help I’m happy to, is the repo hosted somewhere on git?
Also thanks for being the main source for adding channels!
Sounds like a great idea, the more sources we can throw in the better. I'm happy to provide my list of teams if you need something like that to give you a leg up to build it.
My script is just something I put together a few years ago when I was learning Python to make adding channels to events easier as it was all being done by hand. Barely worth sharing, but I don't mind sending it over if you need it as a base.
Posted: 27 Aug 2026 07:19
Moonbags
Edits: 347 Posts: 46 Joined: 2021
Sounds like a great idea, the more sources we can throw in the better. I'm happy to provide my list of teams if you need something like that to give you a leg up to build it.
My script is just something I put together a few years ago when I was learning Python to make adding channels to events easier as it was all being done by hand. Barely worth sharing, but I don't mind sending it over if you need it as a base.
Cool! I’ll take a look and see what I can build but thanks for the offer to share what you have. The big question for me is how do I automate adding a channel to an event? As far as I know there is no public API for this.
Posted: 27 Aug 2026 08:07
curswine
Edits: 1,133,455 Posts: 1,269 Joined: 2020
Sounds like a great idea, the more sources we can throw in the better. I'm happy to provide my list of teams if you need something like that to give you a leg up to build it.
My script is just something I put together a few years ago when I was learning Python to make adding channels to events easier as it was all being done by hand. Barely worth sharing, but I don't mind sending it over if you need it as a base.
Cool! I’ll take a look and see what I can build but thanks for the offer to share what you have. The big question for me is how do I automate adding a channel to an event? As far as I know there is no public API for this.
What I do is construct the details for this end point using the scraped information https://www.thesportsdb.com/api/v1/json/123/searchevents.php?e=Arsenal_vs_Chelsea&d=2015-04-26 and retrieve the eventID, then use that to go to the TV Channel add page https://www.thesportsdb.com/edit_event_tv.php?e=480006 and add the channel that way.
Posted: 01 Sep 2026 08:09
Moonbags
Edits: 347 Posts: 46 Joined: 2021
Thanks for the additional info!
Whilst I start to plan this out, do you think you'd be able to add some rate limiting to your scraper, see if it improves it?
Thanks!
Posted: 01 Sep 2026 10:18
curswine
Edits: 1,133,455 Posts: 1,269 Joined: 2020
Thanks for the additional info!
Whilst I start to plan this out, do you think you'd be able to add some rate limiting to your scraper, see if it improves it?
Thanks!
I already do.
I do one where it tries to add everything as fast as possible and may encounter the rate limiter, and then a second time which adds only for selected leagues and tournaments that stays within the rate limit by waiting 0.61 seconds between calls.
I can't stay within the rate limiter for everything as it would take far too long, this method already takes over an hour to add everything scraped.
