Next Generation Of Online TV To Launch
A new online system is set to go beyond time-shift and on-demand television facilities, with the launch of TIOTI, described by one of its founding partners as a giant personalised digital video recorder online.
The system is “like TiVo for the internet,” according to Paul Cleghorn, who developed the service as a reaction to waiting for the delays in release between the US and the UK of his favourite drama, The West Wing.
TIOTI, or Tape It Off The Internet, is an online service that makes it easy to find, share and discover TV shows. It aggregates content within a social experience, indexing the available shows from a multitude of online destinations and presenting all these viewing options in one place.
The site adds useful tools, such as TV guides and episode data, with a user-friendly interface to find and manage programmes, and creates a user-driven community around television content.
It currently indexes 1,600+ TV shows and almost 90,000 episodes, matching everything up with an ever-increasing number of content sources. It also brings Wiki-style content editing, plus tagging and RSS feeds to the users.
“We want to combine the best of Web 2.0 principles with a thorough understanding of what people want and how the online TV space is growing,” said Marc Colando, co-founder TIOTI. “Pulling together social networks, conversations and aggregation of content from multiple sources under a single unifying brand, TIOTI, serving one specific media type, taking online TV to the next level.”
He continued: “The marketplace for online television is going to get dramatically more segregated in the near-term as everyone from studios to AOL, to Apple to Amazon, as well as the individual TV networks, offer their slices of the media content universe.”
Following successful beta-testing with more than 10,000 users, TIOTI is currently undergoing an initial round of funding for the next level of marketing and technical development to the site. A full service is expected to be available to the public by the end of the year.
Tape It Off The Internet: www.tioti.com