Interview With Paul Pod, Co-founder of TIOTI - the Best TV Site On the Web

On October 31 Paul G. published a post about TIOTI. After contacting the TIOTI team I was granted an invitation to beta test of the application. I found very nice design and great usability. TIOTI aggregates numerous links to various TV shows, reviews of episodes by beta testers and it is even possible to receive notifications of new episodes available for download by RSS feed. One can also add friends and share recommendations about favourite shows. It is also possible to choose favourites and create Top 10 lists for whatever you want (and of course share them with your friends). So today I am pleased to publish an interview with TIOTI co-founder Paul Pod. In the interview Paul will tell us of how he got the idea of TIOTI, of what is already available at TIOTI and of the new features to be added soon.

Svetlana: Hi Paul, I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you. So shall you first introduce yourself for our readers and tell us what projects were you involved in before?

Paul: Ok. I’m Paul Pod, co-founder (with Marc Colando) of TIOTI. My background is as a designer, and until very recently I have been involved in freelance web2.0 and interactive tv type projects in London. I recently worked on MoëTV, a broadband TV startup company providing Russian language TV to a UK audience.

Svetlana: And how did you come up with the idea of TIOTI?

Paul: The idea kind of had been bubbling around for a while, as last year I was involved in a few “future of TV” prototype projects for the BBC. And then one of my favourite shows began its exciting final season (in the USA), while we would have to wait here in the UK for quite a while before we got to see it.

I’d downloaded the odd thing before, but this was the first time I had decided to track the show appearing on the internet (on bit torrent sites) as close to the date the show originally aired. This proved to be more difficult than I had thought. US TV networks would stop the show for 2 weeks gaps, for sports or other ’specials’, so I needed a way of not just keeping track of available downloads, but a TV guide too…

I was surprised no one had made such a thing already. At this point I thought it might be neat to add a social software layer, to let you talk to friends and comment on episodes, as well as make recommendations… so the idea was building in my mind. Meanwhile… over a drink a very un-technical friend of mine, when talking about downloading TV came out with the amazingly wrong, yet brilliant phrase “tape it off the internet”… and we were off.

Svetlana: I see. Clear now. But what about actual implementation: development, team, financing, etc.?

Paul: Well for October - December last year, I started putting ideas and rough designs together on a blog. The blog got some attention and it worked out a good place to put the ideas together and float concepts to the potential audience. The attention also brought calls from possible investors. But the world of venture capital doesn’t do small £50,000 investments… if I had asked for 10 million it’d be fine. So I was talking to Marc about this and he said he would be interested in helping out… he had some great developers in Ukraine that he used for other projects. And they might want to do it for a percentage…

So that’s what got to happen… early 2006 I completed detailed wireframes/designs. Development began roughly in March. And we managed to get to where we are now, a beta site with 3000 users today and 16,000 users waiting invites for (almost) no expense. It’s a good start, and we have many other great things we want to do, as well as much improvement to the site… so it’s only now really we have started looking for investment.

Svetlana: Great results. And is TIOTI your only project now?

Paul: Yes, apart from some small bits of work tying up loose ends on previous jobs, TIOTI is my 100% focus.

Svetlana: Well, the more attention is usually the better.

Paul: Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy with PR and investment meetings here, while handling direct communication with users and sometimes getting some design on our version 1.1.

Svetlana: And on your site you welcome your visitors with ‘Welcome to TIOTI, the best TV site on the web’. Best among what? Which sites do you consider to be your major competitors?

Paul: We’re keeping an eye on “the venice project”, which is a mysterious TV project from the founders of Skype. And there are many people doing parts of what we are doing, but not so many joining up all the dots to create the vision we have. Some of the “social TV” sites are trying things like comments tied to the live broadcast of a show. There are plenty of message boards and communities around one or a small group of shows. And there are a few episode guide and TV schedule sites. No really pulls all this, plus downloads of shows, together in one place… or as well.

Svetlana: And do you think you’ll actually compete with offline TV? Or is it still mostly an addition to conventional TV?

Paul: I think the next 5 years is a transition period for the TV industry… at the moment online TV is a useful addition to regular TV. If you miss a show, or it’s not available when you want it or in your country at all. But this will move towards the internet fulfilling its destiny as the distribution medium for TV. We want to help the TV industry with that transition.

Svetlana: What audience does TIOTI expect to have? I mean who is supposed to use this addition to TV?

Paul: I think we have a pretty broad audience - TV is a very mainstream audience… Until recently the only way to get TV on the internet was to use bit torrent… that’s a pretty techy geeky experience… we want to make that side of things easier, while where possible offering legal downloads to a broader audience too. The British in particular are quite prolific downloaders of TV, partly because of the release gaps we get and partly because so many people have broadband here now.

Svetlana: And that brings me to 2 more questions: How do you gather content for your database? And how do you deal with copyright issues? Do you have some special agreements with TV producers or what?

Paul: Well, I think I need to point out that we don’t host any TV (or even bit torrent files) on TIOTI: we aggregate where those files are available for download - off other web sites. And we also pull in data about TV shows (transmission dates, episode titles, episode guide text, etc) from other web sites. We also let users edit and add their own episode guide info if the stuff we have is missing or wrong or not that great.

As for the copyright, we are a US based company and as such comply with the DMCA (copyright law) and make it possible for copyright owners to get infringing material removed quickly. We are, however, also talking to copyright owners and want to help them open up and monetize their “long tails of tv” to their audience.

Svetlana: Let’s come back to your product itself. What features do the beta testers invited and you personally like best?

Paul: We’re getting a few people using one of our RSS feeds with an application called “Democracy player”. It’s a really cool open source project that combines RSS, bit torrent and a video player in one. When you set up a bunch of favourite TV shows on TIOTI, we generate a feed with a subset of those, ones that have recently aired and have downloads available. That feed, in Democracy player, makes the whole experience automatic… very nice.

Svetlana: Yes, it should be. And are there a lot of new features to be added yet?

Paul: People also want to add more content to the ‘about’ part of TV shows, so we’re going to radically enhance that in our version 1.1 We have lots of people adding tags to shows, so the tag search and tag cloud function will be in the beta very soon. User created groups to chat about things is also very nearly complete. These should be in very soon… and we have loads of cool ideas for improvements and additions.

Svetlana: And for when is release out of beta scheduled?

Paul: We plan to add those 1000’s of patiently waiting users this week when we move to a bigger server… we’ll remain invite only, but without such a long wait, for a while yet. We should be fully public by the end of the year.

Svetlana: Great for you. I’d think you will see your traffic boost after TIOTI is public.

Paul: Yes, we hope to have our first round of investment sorted by then too, so all these great new parts of the site should be added quicker.

Svetlana: And will you need some PR and advertising to draw new users or there’s enough people waiting for your public release?

Paul: That will be fine… If there is one thing I do know, it’s online advertising and building an online buzz.

Svetlana: Well, I’m sure you’ll manage it with such anticipation for TIOTI already present. So Paul, I think that’s enough to make our readers wait for their invitations to TIOTI with even more impatience. Thank you for the invitation for me and for your time answering my questions. I hope you will find time to tell us of your news in future.