A new social networking site has launched which specialises in cataloguing television episodes on the web. TIOTI.com can be used as a gateway to accessing a wealth of TV content online, with useful links to a wide range of online TV services such as Apple, Amazon, AOL and Joost amongst others.
The site now indexes over 75,000 TV shows and more than 500,000 episodes, with those numbers growing every day.
TIOTI also allows users to add links to external sites on the web which offer streaming of TV episodes, regardless of the legality.
Legality issues
Tech.co.uk spoke to TIOTI co-founder Paul Cleghorn who said: "We don't host any illegal material, we index other people's websites, but we don't police them for legal/illegal content. We consider it the responsibility of the website owner to ensure that the content on their site is legal.
"We have a formal take-down policy according to the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
Cleghorn rejected suggestions that the site was just a tool designed to make money out of pirated content. He said: "We're taking a longer view, one where the majority of content over a period of time will become legally available.
"Right now it's a mix, and if TIOTI was just a site with links that wouldn't be so great, but we're trying to build a depth of content about TV shows and communities around them too that will become a compelling starting point when all this 'long-tail' of TV opens up and becomes widely available legitimately.
"Our strategy is based around constant and possibly rapid change around this", he said.
Recommend to friends
In addition to indexing TV content available on the web, TIOTI adds useful social tools that enable you to recommend shows to friends, discuss and see what your friends are watching.
TIOTI also allows the creation of groups to build communities around TV and enables you to add, edit and expand the information on cast, crew, critics, fan fiction, gossip and trivia around TV shows with web links, photos and videos easily integrated from Flickr.com and YouTube.
"TIOTI.com acts as an aggregator of online TV content and a social network for user generated content about TV shows," said Cleghorn. "So we are very excited at being able to open up www.tioti.com for general consumption at a time when major TV players are starting to make their content widely available on the web."
