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TIOTI.com (Tape It Off The Internet) has been almost a year in closed, invite-only beta so hopefully today it’s ready for its close-up. It should do. It’s had 18,000 users users to test the site with, who will now be joined by anyone who registers.
Providing links to a wide range of online TV services such as Apple, Amazon, AOL and Joost, amongst others, TIOTI is now indexing over 75,000 TV shows and more than 500,000 episodes. But let’s be clear - you can’t download the shows from Tioti - it just points to the relevant sources. Thus it is attempting to avoid the legal problems which have dogged other ‘download’ sites.
TIOTI Inc, which is legally based in Seattle, WA, USA, and London, UK, says it is in “advanced talks” with investors for funding. However, I understand that a potential deal with a large UK media company never came to anything, and the search for funding has taken longer than expected.
TIOTI wraps all these feeds in social tools, allowing users to recommend shows to friends, to discuss and see what their friends are watching. Think Facebook meets TV on-demand. Users can add, edit and expand the information on cast, crew, critics, fan fiction, gossip and trivia around TV shows with links, photos and videos integrated from Flickr.com and YouTube.
TIOTI also uses your favourite TV shows as a starting point to make recommendations for new (and old) shows. Each show and episode can also be recommended to people, rated, discussed with others, and you can see what shows other people like too.
The ‘Friends and Episode’ tracker lets users see where they are up to in the episodes of a show, and where their friends are up to. Useful if your friends are in the US, while you are in the UK, for instance.
TIOTI is hoping to exploit the global trend to watch TV online. The latest figures on TV-viewing habits by the Royal Television Society in the UK show that under-30 year olds watch 40 per cent of their television by downloading it over the internet or viewing it ‘on demand’ rather than watching it as broadcast TV.
The team: Paul Cleghorn, based in London, is TIOTI’s creative director, and previously ran the design agency Neuromantics. Before this he held senior design positions at Poke, Razorfish, BT Research Labs and Xerox. He also worked at Aggregator.tv, which went into administration in May. His co-founder Marc Colando, is based in Seattle, and is TIOTI’s technical director. He ran Interactive Planet, Inc. which developed of internet and intranet environments for clients including Bank of America, The Coca-Cola Company, Earthlink, Equifax, Kodak, The US Marine Corps and Vodafone.
I would be very surprised if they had 18000 people private beta testing with such a terrible alexa ranking i think they need to take the zeros off and they might be getting near to the real figure
No use to me, as I am deaf and it does not show subtitles
Hi Jas, that’s an interesting comment as I have right here a spreadsheet with the 18,000 users who signed up and tried out our beta - that’s an invited 18k out of near 100,000 who applied for access. Alexa isn’t really a reliable indicator for small scale private audiences such as this I guess.
The Stream for “Free” links they provide isn’t this classed as distributing copyrighted material in the US! see “http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9022/MPAA+Goes+After+2+More+Video+Streaming+Sites” tioti.com is doing the same thing!
Yes they may offer purchase links off to Amazon but its not really helping the media industry! its more helping his own pocket, every completed purchase via Amazon will earn him X amount of dollars! its an interesting way of making money! Well as least its not plastered with banner Ads and popups(yet!)
Today seems to be ‘Internet TV’ day with Joost, TITIO and also:
Testcard TV - http://www.testcard.tv/
launching (disclosure I’m an investor in Testcard TV)
Anon - this is a very interesting and important point your making. We see testcard.tv working with the industry to enable them to make money from content they own. UK copyright laws are somewhat different but never the less the sector is clearly about to go through huge change over the coming months and years.
We’re demoing tomorrow at mashup* Demo (www.mashupdemo.com - TechCrunch UK are a media supporter of that event) - so catch you there I hope.
Long live tv…
Alexa isn’t a reliable indication of traffic to any site.
Simon, its a shame testcard.tv has ripped my sites DB! I have to say you are very brave backing a site of testcards nature, I popped along to Adtech last week I have to say some of the reaction to my site, interesting to say the least!
*snip* I was going to talk about copyrights but didn’t want to shoot myself in the foot!
I’ll see if I can pop along to mashup* might make an interesting meeting
This Paul Cleghorn is all talk LMAO what a loser, let see where you and this site is in lets say 3 months time…. nice bit of writing mind for a PR stunt lol but it won’t help you in your dreams cos thats all they are is dreams…
Hey Anon it would not surprise me if he did rip your DB tbh, you site wich ever one it is has nothing to worry about…
I got to go now cos i am LMAO tbh
Anon - would be happy to meet and you are more than welcome at mashup* Demo (www.mashupdemo.com - please register for fire limits) tonight.
I agree testcard.com and tvl are working in ‘interesting’ times - but ‘times’ changes.
Look forward to meeting - tonight I hope.
Best regards,
Simon
O.k put it this way you would only need a few testers with an alexa toolbar to push your site into the top 100 and it took 7 of us a few days to break into the top 100 on a test site so i would be amazed if none of the 18000 had an alexa toolbar.
So in one respect you are correct, but i’m puzzeled where you would get 100,000 pre sign up’s from in the first place ??
If you wanna email the 100,000 or 18,000 on the spreadsheet you have it would your point but i doubt it
Being one of the testers for TIOTI I can gladly say I don’t use crap like the Alexa toolbar. Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even work in things like Firefox or Opera? Oh well.
Yes it works with firefox and opera used very minimal compared to ie6,7and firefox.
Most developers generally use alexa just as an indicator on how well a site is doing but not just alexa,it’s just a guide thats all so basically youre wrong to suggest most developers are not smart because they use an alexa toolbar.
I believe the figures quoted to make it gain traction but i don’t buy it and most people savvy enough won’t either.
Proof is in the pudding and lets see what it’s doing this time next year !
Most read story on the guardian newspaper website yesterday was about the closure of http://www.tv-links.co.uk and arrest of its owner, all for *linking* to tv and film content hosted on other sites such as veoh, youtube etc.
Expect TIOTI’s potential investor partners to stop returning calls right about now.
Thanks all information.
“I believe the figures quoted to make it gain traction but i don’t buy it and most people savvy enough won’t either.” Ok
Being one of the testers for TIOTI I can gladly say I don’t use crap like the Alexa toolbar. Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even work in things like Firefox or Opera? Oh well.
so catch you there I hope
Today seems to be ‘Internet TV’ day with Joost, TITIO and also:
Testcard TV - http://www.testcard.tv/
launching (disclosure I’m an investor in Testcard TV)
Anon - this is a very interesting and important point your making. We see (goute )
testcard.tv working with the industry to enable them to make money from content they own. UK copyright laws are somewhat different but never the less the sector is clearly about to go through huge change over the coming months and years.
We’re demoing tomorrow at mashup* Demo (www.mashupdemo.com - TechCrunch UK are a media supporter of that event) - so catch you there I hope.
http://www.mashupdemo.com specials scrips
see you..
thanks a lot
Being one of the testers for TIOTI I can gladly say I don’t use crap like the Alexa toolbar. Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even work in things like Firefox or Opera? Oh well.
Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even
Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even
Most people savvy enough to know and test a site like TIOTI I think are smart enough to not load up their browsers with toolbars. Does the bar even
Anon - this is a very interesting and important point your making. We see (goute )
testcard.tv working with the industry to enable them to make money from content they own. UK copyright laws are somewhat different but never the less the sector is clearly about to go through huge change over the coming months and years.
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Alexa isn’t a reliable indication of traffic to any site.
Alexa isn’t a reliable indication of traffic to any site.
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