TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher has written a long post about the future of TV on the internet based on an exclusive interview with Paul Cleghorn, the founder of the new TV aggregation site Tape It Off the Internet. Our previous coverage of TIOTI is here.
Cleghorn’s primary contention is that bringing TV online will be much easier than has been the music industry’s experience. His project, TIOTI searches and smartly scrapes iTunes, AOL video, Amazon’s Unbox service and BitTorrent for links to available TV shows. The end result is a feature rich aggregation site that Cleghorn intends to sell ads on. He says it’s like “TiVo for the Internet.”
It’s a long and detailed post worth checking out - while you’re there you should check out the rest of the work being done by team TechCrunch UK. They’re doing a good job over there.
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Sounds great
I’m confused on how it works. Help?
It basically scours the internet looking for video footage of TV shows and then brings them all to one place where you can select and watch it.
There’s no denying that we’re going to see even more convergence between the TV and the Internet, culminating, most probably, in TV being broadcast over the Net and vice versa. TIOTI, in my opinion, is definitely a visionary step in the right direction, much more so than Google’s acquisition of YouTube. Who needs TV, anyway? I haven’t used my TV set at all for over a year except to watch DVDs!
Who needs TV? Probably the couple of billion people around the globe who still don’t have affordable internet or connection good enough to watch streaming videos. Add to that the fact that most residential connections even in the US and UK cannot stream HD-quality videos due to current bandwidth limitations and price, and it looks like TV is not going anywhere.
I personally barely watch TV (an hour a week tops) but one shouldn’t forget that some people in first world countries still don’t have internet, nevermind the developing countries which account for the majority of world population.
it shocks me that people are only just now seeing that internet tv was coming. it was already on its way to where we are now last year!
Replying to 5:
Jake, I agree that, at the moment, Internet is not yet a full-fledged substitute for TV. However, the keyword here is “yet”. I concede that there are a lot of people out there (indeed, billions of them, as you correctly pointed out) who do not have access to the bandwith speeds required to actually replace TV with Internet - however, I’m quite confident that as technology improves, the situation will improve as well.
With all that said, there is a market for streamed videos already, and that market will, I believe, grow in the future, so anyone investing into the sector now is probably making a fairly safe bet.
Bandwidth is a finite.
George I absolutely agree that technology is the main thing holding us back. It’s definetely going to be interesting to see how everything plays out as bandwidth gets cheaper and more and more people turn to the internet for movies and TV shows. iTunes and Youtube seem to be pretty good indicators that there is an ever growing demand for streaming videos.
Historically, services have gotten cheapen when more consumers use them.
id like to think that it will all be available real soon but experience has shown us that these ambitious projects take a long time to get off of the guound but luckily we arent going anywhere!
good luck on expanding this idea!
yeah…i don’t get the TV thing…its like, why? your on the internet, now you want to watch TV through the internet when you can probably just watch it normally…he goes on to say…it like Tivo” for the internet..but what’s wrong with Tivo and just plain TV? I guess being redundant is cool now.
@ lemon o brien et al
You have to try it out to understand why PC TV is compelling……connect your PC to your TV and fire up YouTube on the big picture, and then sit and imagine what this might be with a bit of development.
If you then try something like this TIOTI system, which is a bit more on the way to being an EPG, you start to get a view to where all this is headed.
We have done some of this stuff, I blogged about our experiences here
The Web will go to video as bandwidth goes up…it went from text to pictures to moving pictures to audio….
Whether TIOTI is “the thing” or not is too early to tell, but I’m sure someone will buy them
Bandwidth speeds are pretty fast - if you’ve ever watched a movie online (I’ve watched tons), it works pretty well on a traditional high speed line. The compression technology that makes it possible has also improved significantly (had a big video client in the past) so really in my opinion it’s more about consumer adoption. Speeds and quality need to improve of course but moreso, the mass consumer audience has only really cut its teeth on video within the past year - their threshold for watching anything longer than 6 minutes is what really holds everything up.
But a lot of TV companies are working to create internet ready tvs - not “surf the web via your tv!” styles as in the past, but where your tv’s connected right into the IP channel and you watch stuff as you’d watch it traditionally - creating a familiar user experience (aka, tv versus watching it on your PC) is the key to increasing adoption. The features and capabilities with this are endless and going to be so cool. We’ve been doing this via our xBox for at least a year.
This space has been jumping for some time - major players like comcast have made announcements, rainbow tv (who makes bravo) has something in place - it’s where i feel you’re going to see a big disruption to interactive entertainment (aka, social networking) and an increase of passive entertainment users, which nobody seems to be focusing on right now. As more people are given choices on how to use the Web, things will change. Search services like this and CriticalTV are smart - Critical’s leveraging it to monitor global tv activity and provide it to the government, politicians, networks, etc. - it’s a smart move to generate revenue while we all wait for consumers to evolve and adopt.
As consumer acceptance of the length of internet video goes up, and the deployment of internet tvs comes in, this’ll all come together. It’s a smart place to play right now.
Slowest launching startup EVER. I’m so close to writing it off as vaporware.
“Children of TIOTI, welcome to a brighter future. A future where anger, sorrow, jealousy and ignorance are defunct. No more internal weeping when downtown traffic threatens your appointment with ‘24′. No blistering rows with your girlfriend about whether ‘Seinfeld’ counts as quality time. No blank stares when your international friends discuss Series 3 of ‘Lost’ and you’re still on Series 2.”
This is from the website. Are these clowns pretentious or what?
Why do i need this? I have a TV and TIVO.
^ think ahead. if televison content goes over the web, and you have the choice to watch it on whatever device you want (wireless, your PC, your internet-ready tv) then the ability to search for shows relevant to you will be useful to you - and therefore, a good service for somebody to offer.
i still don’t get it…why would i want all this equipment…internet/pc/tv just to watch tv…
maybe you guys are hicks; but i live in san francisco, and for free..i get to watch german, itallian, russian, korean, mexican, spansih, whatever…plus the normal American tv stations.
second…if you want 600 channels, get a satelite dish.
what makes the internet special, is, that its not TV. Why do you think its becoming more popular than TV? cause people don’t give a shit about TV anymore.
i think this is like fan-boy gone wild.
^ well for one, it would just be a regular TV and instead of your usual broadcast pipeline going into it, it’d be the internet. It’s not something you would even know the difference on (at least in theory). my guess on why convergence is happening is because the IP channel is the most stable network - it can survive wars, disasters, whatever (at least that’s what people say). given this, this would mean that if the internet pipeline was providing you all those tv stations you see now, it would also be able to do so during a critical disaster, etc.
you would not need anything to watch TV but a single device - that device would be your choice. It could be a mobile device, a traditional looking TV like you see in your house today, or your PC.
that’s the idea behind it. big guns are not pushing for this for no good reason - it’s what is coming your way. you will eventually adapt to it as you adapted to the end of casette tapes and the entry of CDs or any other change in your technology.
it really has nothing to do with the actual content or what channels you get. but companies like this one are seeing the inevitable progression of this and therefore making solutions that fit in.
wireless, telecom, etc. are all progressing toward going over the IP channel. this is just another form of convergence we are seeing.
Mmmm…Not sure this will be such a big idea. Aggregating other people’s information, especially when there isn’t that much of it available. Right now one can handle in mind most of the major content providers.
This pre beta test site has the look and feel of a mature myspace but is still lacking all the bells and whistles. It does have some very sticky features that get addictive and fast. I spoke with some testor from over seas and says that full commerce will be joining after the bugs are out and that this was the bigest secret in all of tech hungy Asia. I am on and keeping a close eye out. New features come on daily and beta launch (I’m told starts in early Dec. I will be curious to see what anyone thinks about his one. I am there and can be easily found by my name Kim Jolly.
Cheers
Duh, the site is http://www.vois.com. for the rest here it is:
This pre beta test site has the look and feel of a mature myspace but is still lacking all the bells and whistles. It does have some very sticky features that get addictive and fast. I spoke with some testor from over seas and says that full commerce will be joining after the bugs are out and that this was the bigest secret in all of tech hungy Asia. I am on and keeping a close eye out. New features come on daily and beta launch (I’m told starts in early Dec. I will be curious to see what anyone thinks about his one. I am there and can be easily found by my name Kim Jolly.
Cheers