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I’ve had TIOTI on my feed list for a while now. From the day the original concept was published and rumours went around the blog world it took a little while before it came to fruition (unsurprisingly). I’ve been playing around with the beta for a while now although not as much as I expected to before it actually came out (if that makes any sense!). The concept is fantastic, sort of like a socially charged, P2P breathing Radio Times without the schedule bit, is about the best way of describing it. Being able to see what your friends have and havn’t watched potentially saves a lot of plot spoiling for one thing! I’m not going to bother covering the whole thing here, Ian Forrester has written his thoughts on it and TechCrunch also did a piece on it which between them have convered most of it.

I agree very much with what Ian has said about it in that the AJAX perhaps goes a bit too far and this is indeed my biggest gripe too although perhaps in a different way. As a web application I don’t believe it fulfills its potential in the same way it might as a full desktop application. I’ve used it in a couple of ways recently to try and get the best use, I’ve used Opera to browse it and manage bittorrent downloads and then VLC to play and I’ve also tried using the Democracy player. Democracy works very well in a lot of ways as it has the media player, bittorrent support and RSS support built in and so works quite well as the desktop interface. For me the best mix would be what Democracy does plus adding the social, planning and suggestion functions which TIOTI provides so well. Its the little things which make it in a lot of ways more of a hassle to use, tagging shows which I’ve watched is something a desktop version could do automatically for example. Perhaps a plugin for Democracy would make the most of it?

On another note, its going to be interesting to see where the founders of Skype go with the Venice Project, I’m signed up for the beta now so hopefully this will be opened up a little more soon, from what is being described at the moment this looks to be a very interesting project although I am skeptical over the full screen high quality video streams they are promising! Interestingly viral is mentioned as a method of spreading the word but there’s no RSS feed just a very 90’s email newsletter, fortunatly mailbucket.org does a good job of fixing this!

Comments have now been turned off on this archive post as an added spam measure to Akismet

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 10:09 pm and is filed under IPTV, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.