Build Pages Around Celebrities

Rovi TV Listings offers extensive and continuously updated data and images for celebrities, including schedules of upcoming television programs they will appear in. You can get program listings for a celebrity for any time period within the next two weeks (or previous two weeks).

The data available for a celebrity includes:

• Images
• Awards
• Credits
• Personal data
• Program IDs you can use as links to program pages
• Schedule of upcoming broadcasts the celebrity appears in

All of this data is available with just one to three calls.

You can reduce the number of calls you make by creating celebrity pages, program pages, and TV schedules that work together:

• In your TV schedule pages, show programs with links to program pages
• In your program pages, show celebrity credits with links to celebrity pages
• In your celebrity pages, show program credits with links to program pages
• With the IDs returned for these pages, you save yourself the calls you would otherwise need to get celebrity credit IDs and program IDs.

Note: Images of celebrities must be displayed with a photographer (author) credit if available. For images from Getty Images, the full photographer/collection/owner credit must be displayed next to the image. If space prevents that, you may omit parts of the credit to show just Getty Images or Getty, provided the full credit is displayed at the next reasonable alternative location, even if that is on another screen, if that location exists.

Before you start designing or programming a television schedule with upcoming celebrity appearances, be sure to read the page Getting Started With Rovi REST TV Listings, and especially the section Understanding Television Services and Sources.

Designing Your Celebrity Page

Here are design guidelines for building a page around celebrities.

1. 

   A Sample Celebrity Page
   Plan the layout around the data you want to include:
• Images
• Awards
• Credits
• Personal data
• Schedule of upcoming broadcasts the celebrity appears in
2. Decide what personal data you want to present.
• Biography
• Factsheet
• Birth name
• Zodiac sign
• Birth and death dates
• Profession and description
• High school and college names
• Other names the person has been known by
• Relatives, their relationship, and link to a page about that person
3. Consider any properties you want for returned images:
• JPG or PNG
• Image type
• Number of images
• Image aspect ratio
• Number of people in the image
• Horizontal and vertical resolutions
4. Decide what data you want to present for awards and award nominations.
• Year
• Category
• Show title
• Show medium
• Type of award
• Award or nomination
• Link to your page about the show
5. Decide what data you want to present for television and movie credits.
• Part name
• Episode title
• Type of credit
• Year started and ended
• Number of episodes the person appeared in
• Show title
• Show language
• Show description
• Show release year
• Show parental ratings
• Image from the show (not returned for all credits)
• Show category: news, movie, music, sports, lifestyle, children's
• First and last air dates
• Link to your page about the show
6. For an upcoming broadcast schedule, decide whether to offer local or, in the US, national listings.
• Local listings require a call to get the service ID of the television service the user is watching.
• The service ID for US national listings do not require an additional call, but the response does not return channel numbers. Viewers generally know what local channels these national sources appear on.
7. Decide what data you want to display for a broadcast schedule.
• Data about the local television service (for more detail, see the response object Service)
  • City served
  • Name of the service
  • Name of the service provider
  • Type of service: cable, satellite, broadcast, etc.
• Decide what channel data you want to present and how you want to present it.
  • Channel number (for local listings)
  • Full name of the source of channel programming
  • Call letters for the source of channel programming
  • Display name for the source of channel programming
  • Logo for the source of channel programming (requires an additional call for each logo)
• Decide what program data you want to present and how you want to present it. You can, for example, present information in icons, font colors, or background colors and show a legend for what each means.
  • HD
  • CC
  • DSS
  • DVS
  • SAP
  • Color
  • Dolby
  • Sports
  • Stereo
  • Subtitles
  • Letterbox
  • Episode title
  • Sign language
  • TV parental rating
  • Program description
  • Program or series title
  • Type: new, live, taped, repeat
  • Category: news, movie, music, sports, lifestyle, children's
  • Subcategory

Building Your Celebrity Page

With your design in mind, build your page as follows.

1. Get the credit ID for the celebrity from one of these sources:
• In your program pages, add links to celebrity credits.
• Capture name IDs from any response that returns name IDs. For a complete list of requests that return name IDs, click here.
• Provide a search box as input to a Search request. Consider using Autocomplete or SingleStageSearch to predict the search.
2. If you want to provide a schedule of upcoming TV programs a celebrity appears in, get the service ID for the television service from one of these sources:
• For a local television service, call listings/services with the country and, for the US and Canada, a postal code. From the response, offer the list of service names to choose from.
• For US national services, you can use any of the following service IDs:

Time Zone	Complete (87+ Listings)	Widget (30+ Listings)
Eastern	80001	84801
Central	80002	84800
Pacific	80004	84798

3. Call listings/celebritydetails with the credit ID from step 1 and, optionally, the service ID from step 2.
• For the include parameter, select the data you decided to return.
  • All
  • AKAs
  • Images
  • Awards
  • Credits
  • Relations
  • Biography
  • Factsheets
• To return an upcoming broadcast schedule, specify the serviceid, startdate, duration, and inprogress parameters.
  • The startdate parameter defaults to now, and duration defaults to two weeks.
  • The inprogress parameter defaults to false, so specify true if you want to return broadcasts that are currently airing.
• To get the best images for your celebrity pages, see the section "Getting Images for Celebrity Pages" in Getting Started With Rovi REST TV Listings.
• Request a compressed response to reduce data transfer time: include Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate in the HTTP header.
• Grab the data in the response that you decided in your design steps to display.
• Paint the data.