rotv-mcp

Read-only Model Context Protocol server for tv.madeinro.eu — Romanian TV guide, streaming catalog and an entertainment concierge, exposed as 14 tools to any MCP-compatible client (Claude, ChatGPT, or your own agent) — including an MCP Apps visual tonight-card.

Live endpoint: https://tv.madeinro.eu/mcp · no auth · streamable HTTP Registry: eu.madeinro/rotv-mcp (official MCP registry) Human-readable overview: tv.madeinro.eu/mcp/help

Quick start

No installation, no key — talk to the live server directly:

# What's important on Romanian TV today? (World Cup, finals, Romania playing…)
curl -X POST https://tv.madeinro.eu/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{
        "name":"tv_important_today","arguments":{}}}'

# Decide for me: I have 2 free hours tonight
curl -X POST https://tv.madeinro.eu/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{
        "name":"tv_concierge","arguments":{"duration_hours":2,"mood":"captivant"}}}'

As an MCP client (e.g. Claude Code):

claude mcp add --transport http rotv https://tv.madeinro.eu/mcp

Tools

All tools are read-only and declare the standard MCP annotations (readOnlyHint: true), so well-behaved clients can run them without per-call confirmation. Time references accepted throughout: now, tonight, tomorrow, weekend, primetime, or ISO 8601 instant/range.

Core EPG (v1)

Tool	What it does
tv_now_on_tv	What's on right now — the 14 main Romanian channels or all channels in the guide
tv_search_program	Search the schedule by keywords and timeframe
tv_get_prime_time	Tonight's 20:00–23:00 (Europe/Bucharest) lineup, grouped by channel
tv_recommend_today	Ranked picks for today (channel quality, timing, preferences)
tv_get_title_details	One title across TV airings + streaming providers

Decision layer (v2)

Tool	What it does
tv_recommend_by_mood	Ranked list matched to a mood (obosit / vesel / concentrat / romantic / familie / captivant)
tv_plan_evening	A TV plan that fills a long window with consecutive programmes (TV only; one pick incl. streaming = tv_concierge)
tv_compare_options	Side-by-side trade-offs between candidate picks
tv_find_for_couple	Picks that satisfy two different moods at once
tv_explain_recommendation	Transparent scoring breakdown for any candidate
tv_check_freshness	How fresh the underlying EPG/streaming data is

Concierge (v3)

Tool	What it does
tv_concierge	One decision, not a list. A single primary pick for your free-time window with a confidence % and full reasoning, plus up to 3 diverse alternatives with explicit trade-offs. Built-in anti-noise filter (news/politics/reality), title dedup, opportunity-cost lookahead — and event awareness (below).
tv_important_today	What actually matters today: World Cup / Euro / Champions League matches, finals, knockout games, Romania's team and clubs. Every event ships with quoted evidence from the EPG text.

MCP Apps (v3.2+)

Tool	What it does
tv_concierge (card since v3.3)	The concierge decision above also renders as a visual card (ui://rotv/concierge-card): the single primary pick with channel/platform, local time, disclosed confidence and reasoning, the important-event banner, and the alternatives with their explicit trade-offs.
tv_tonight_card	Tonight's picks as a visual card. The daily decision (importance-scored major event, or a deterministic prime-time film fallback) plus one pick per vertical — TV, streaming (official Netflix RO top 10), theater (online + stage), cinema (box office ∩ today's screenings) — and measured stats. Declares _meta.ui.resourceUri → ui://rotv/tonight-card; hosts supporting the MCP Apps extension (Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, Goose) render it as an interactive card in a sandboxed iframe, everyone else gets the same structured JSON.

The importance layer

Romanian EPG data is diffuse: every program's genre is literally "General", descriptions are often empty, and a World Cup knockout match can appear as just "Fotbal World Cup". There is no structured field that says "this matters".

So importance is detected from real text, with quoted evidence (src/lib/importance.mjs):

• Tier 1 — major: World Cup / Euro / Champions League / Olympics / Grand Slams / finals in the title
• Tier 2 — notable: country-vs-country fixtures ("Spania - Belgia"), competition mentions in descriptions
• Boosts: Romania playing (national team or clubs in European cups), knockout stages, mainstream national channel
• Demotions: recaps, studio/practice shows, broadcasts too short to be the live event

Every result carries reasons[] quoting the text that matched — the detector never claims more than the data supports. The same signal feeds tv_concierge as an event_importance confidence axis, so a description-less World Cup match no longer loses to a well-tagged filler movie, and every concierge answer lists tier-1 events in an important_today field even when the mood-based pick is something else.

Architecture

MCP client ── POST /mcp (streamable HTTP, stateless: fresh server per request)
                 │
        express (loopback :3010)
        access log → rate limit (60 rpm) → optional bearer auth
                 │
        14 tools over in-memory EPG/streaming caches
        + 2 MCP Apps UI resources (tonight-card · concierge-card)
                 │
        JSON artifacts produced by the rotv-guide pipeline
        (epg-normalized.json · epg-homepage.json · streaming-full.json
         · tonight-picks.json)
        hot-reloaded via fs.watch (debounced 750 ms)

• Stateless streamable HTTP (enableJsonResponse) — one McpServer + transport per POST; safe behind any proxy/tunnel.
• Data (read-only, produced by the rotv-guide pipeline, never modified by this service):
  • epg-normalized.json — all TV channels in the guide (260+; the count is computed, not fixed), −6h to +72h, ISO 8601 UTC
  • epg-homepage.json — 15 main channels, −2h to +36h
  • streaming-full.json — Netflix / HBO Max / Prime / Disney+ / Apple TV+ catalogs
  • Paths configurable via ROTV_DATA_DIR.
• Telemetry: every tool call logs one JSON line ({evt:"tool", tool, ms, ok, q:{…}}) to stdout for log analysis.

Running it yourself

Requires Node ≥ 24 and the rotv-guide data artifacts.

cp .env.example .env        # PORT, RATE_LIMIT_RPM, optional MCP_AUTH_TOKEN
npm install
ROTV_DATA_DIR=/path/to/rotv-guide/public/data npm start

Production runs under pm2 behind a Cloudflare tunnel — the path-based ingress rule routes tv.madeinro.eu/mcp/* to localhost:3010, above the catch-all of the main site:

pm2 start ecosystem.config.cjs && pm2 save
curl https://tv.madeinro.eu/mcp/health

Tests

node --test test/importance.test.mjs        # importance detector, 12 cases
npm run smoke                               # 26 end-to-end JSON-RPC checks
BASE=https://tv.madeinro.eu npm run smoke   # same suite against production

License

MIT © 2026 Marian Matinca. The live server surfaces data from public EPG sources, refreshed automatically by the rotv-guide pipeline.