Playing with Perl Backstage

As most of you ‘net savvy people know, the BBC has put a number of feeds online under the banner of BBC Backstage. While it’s nice to see organisations like the BBC offering this kind of data (and the front man, Ben Metcalfe seems a nice, and interesting guy) the initial release of one of the more interesting bits of data, the TV Anytime TV and radio data, only had a Java API available for using it.

But no more! Leon (Lord of the Orange) Brocard has written and released a TV Anytime Perl module suitable for reading the format. And it works very nicely! A simple example, that mostly works :), is my show films script that attempts to pull out all the films on the BBC channels. My verdict? The BBC service is great to play with and the TV::Anytime module makes it a hell of a lot easier to get started.