In my 28 years I have refined TV watching into an art-form. It was only the Internet revolution that disrupted my intensive TV watching regime. As most Rev2 readers will know, the convergence of these two media channels is fast becoming a global reality.
Recently I got the opportunity to review Tioti, a new start-up that provides a TV show aggregating service online. Unfortunately in New Zealand I am not blessed with the type of broadband speed that most Rev2 readers situated in the USA are used to. Watching television content online does require an acceptable level of bandwidth, so this review took quite a while 
The service offered by Tioti is beautifully basic. They are positioning themselves as ‘the long tail of TV’. The site is in beta phase 2, so naturally there are a few bugs at the moment. The great thing about a web 2.0 start-up is the ability that one has to engage beta site members as a testing resource and it seems that Tioti are using this tactic successfully.
After watching the promo video and joining up I decided to target SouthPark episodes on Tioti for the purpose of this review. Unfortunately the sites internal search function did not yield any results for the term ’southpark’, however, another search for ‘South Park’ was successful.
Once you find the show that you are looking for Tioti does a good job of providing members with valuable information such as Cast lists (not so useful for south park!) and reviews by other members. A discussion board for each TV show is also provided.
The now conventional web 2.0 features such as ‘recommend this show’ and ‘add to favorites’ hold prominent place in the user interface. There is also a ‘find fans’ function which allows the user to visualize the true popularity of the TV show amongst their Tioti friend network as well as the entire network. It would be cool to know if my friends really are watching those cheesy soap opera’s that they continually deny tuning into!
There seems to be an acceptable level of content at this point and this will only grow as new members join up and take the opportunity to upload new content from the likes of youtube.
Depending on the progress of new services like Tioti, it may not be long before the Internet is the chosen channel for watching your favorite TV shows from traditional networks!
