You might find this helpful – you’ve been able to browse schedules by radio station or TV channel for a while now which is great, but what if you don’t care where the BBC broadcasts your favourite Olympic sport, music genre or SciFi programme?

To help you find programmes, no matter which station or channel they are broadcast on, we’ve started publishing schedules for all our genres (sport, music etc.). These views are being used as part of the BBC’s Olympics coverage – specifically to drive the TV schedule and individual sport pages. But as you might be able to guess a little bit of URL hacking gives you more. All you need to do is add /schedules to the end of any genre aggregation, so for example:

A schedule for your favourite music genre :
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/music/classicpopandrock/schedules

What’s happening on the Olympics:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/sport/olympics/schedules

Drama on radio:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio/programmes/genres/drama/schedules

Or science and the environment on Radio 4:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/genres/factual/sciencenatureandenvironment/schedules

And obviously you can get this data both as HTML and as XML, JSON, YAML just by adding .xml .json or .xml to the end of the URL. So the TV coverage for sailing as XML is:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/sport/sailing/schedules.xml

Hope that helps you find your favorite programme.

UPDATE

As Duncan has previously discussed on the BBC’s Radio Lab blog you can also get this data in your Calendar via iCal – just add .../upcoming.ics to the above URL. For example:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/sport/sailing/schedules/upcoming.ics

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/genres/factual/sciencenatureandenvironment/schedules/upcoming.ics