A productivity script and Photoshop template that scrapes content from the web and generates content for the Sky Cinema and Sky Sports upsell apps on Virgin TV.

“Sky Scraper” demo

Background

Keeping the content fresh in a TV app that advertises Sky add-ons on Virgin TV was difficult because it was very time consuming to update. For a few years it was being done by hand in Photoshop. I was aware that Sky was updating their content on their website frequently, sometimes every week, so I had the idea to bring the content directly into Photoshop from the web. Sky had no APIs set up to serve the content to Virgin Media, so wrote a script to scrape the website, place the content in the template, and then export the assets.

What took hours previously only now takes a few minutes.


Original design proposal for the web scraping version of the Sky Upsell TV app (click to open PDF)

Features

  • Running the script opens and closes the Photoshop template automatically.
  • Choose between scraping data from Sky Cinema, Sky Sports, or both.
  • List the data found before importing it, saving time.
  • Choose which artwork to use on a launch tile from a pulldown menu.
  • Set a render destination in the UI
  • Close all open files when exporting.
  • Exports and names the files for you in the final file structure, and zips them for email.
  • Tests internet connection and throws error if there’s a problem
  • Even runs through an internet proxy.
  • UI design, coding: Ryan Gilmore