Tape it off the internet: television 2.0
It seems like a very long time ago that I added myself to the waiting list to be notified of the TIOTI site launch. This promising web service had all but slipped my mind. Then today I found an invite to join their beta test sitting in my inbox. I immediately created my account to check it out.
Yes, that IS the tv show Matt Houston they are recommending to me there in the screenshot 
Now Matt Houston is no Colt Seavers by any means. But it’s cool that TIOTI is spreading the word about these gems of early 80s television, just the same.
So, to explain the concept behind all of this, TIOTI is basically TV web2.0ified. It’s a mashup of episode guides and show summaries with downloads delivered via Bittorrent to create the souped up internet version of tivo. The whole thing is glued together with all of the “community” features that every web service needs to have now that MySpace is a household word. And of course then the whole thing was dipped in a bucket of AJaX functionality, which unfortunately seems to preform kind of slow at this point, but it is still in closed beta after all.
The idea is, you search for the tv shows you are interested in, adding your favorites to your, um “favorites list”. When you locate a show you can get a quick view of the episodes organized by season. If the episode is available for download somewhere, you click a link and start downloading it via Bittorrent. All the while the system gives suggestions of other shows that you might be interested in (think Last.fm for tv). Luckily you can click a “don’t show me this” link next to the suggestions so it never recommends “Caroline in the City” or that damn Britney and Kevin show to you again in the future. As you view the listed episodes for a show you have the option to participate in discussions about the episode, mark them viewed and rate them.
Now where all of this starts to really get useful is, your profile for each show creates a customized RSS feed. So when an episode that you haven’t marked as viewed turns up for download, it pops into the RSS feed. If you have your Bittorrent client setup to check that RSS feed, it can automatically start downloading the new episode for you to view later at your convenience. Of course there are already RSS feeds for tv shows out there that you can use in the same way, but TIOTI brings it all together in a slick package.
Once all the kinks are worked out and TIOTI opens to everybody, I think it could really challenge the traditional paradigms of tv broadcast and move us closer to the “content on demand” world hinted at for years… that is if, the shows are actually out there for download and the whole sha-bang isn’t sued out of existence, in a “The Future of Ideas” like fashion. TIOTI isn’t as cool as flying cars, but it’s a small step towards the future our technology has been promising us for a while. So get your hands on a TIOTI invite and unplug your tv.
