iview-proxy

A proxy web app that serves ABC iView content outside of the iView webplayer, avoiding intrusive data harvesting.

Purpose

This project has two main goals:

Avoid as much account authentication as possible to watch ABC iView content,
Avoid providing as much data as possible to iView to stop data harvesting.

Despite being aptly warned, the ABC has taken a forceful approach to collecting ABC iView data. This app seeks to remedy this by obtaining iView medias' m3u8 playlists, and isolating them to a locked-down media player, completely free of any analytics tracking.

How does it work?

Search

The search function on iView is riddled with analytics tracking:

{
	"requests": [
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=6&filters=docType%3A%20category%20OR%20docType%3A%20channel&ruleContexts=iview_categories&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=8&filters=docType%3A%20Program&ruleContexts=iview_programs&page=0&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=8&filters=docType%3A%20VideoEpisode%20AND%20NOT%20subType%3A%20feature%20AND%20NOT%20subType%3A%20livestream&ruleContexts=iview_episodes&page=0&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		}
	]
}

So iview-proxy disables it all, and locks down iView's search to the bare-minimum, keeping your data safe.

Watching

When you watch a video on the normal iView site, all sorts of data is sent back to iView and third parties, which is concerning to those who care about their privacy. See here.

iview-proxy calls only show/series metadata APIs to get the video info, and acts as if it is a web scraper of sorts. Once it has the video source for a show, it plays it in a non-custom video.js player, completely free of any analytics tracking.

Setup

The actual app is contained in the src directory.

Install required dependencies
```
npm install
```
Start the server
```
npm start
```
or
```
node .
```
Navigate to localhost:1984 in a browser to access the app.

kaputnikGo / iview-proxy