December 5th 2008 – London, UK - ‘Next generation guidance’ company Vizimo today announced the acquisition of TIOTI, the popular, interactive, TV social networking website.  Vizimo plans to use TIOTI as a shop window in which to pioneer, demonstrate and test new functionality and tools that tie together TV, the web and, increasingly, mobile devices.

TIOTI – an acronym for ‘Tape It Off The Internet’ - launched in Spring 2007 to considerable media interest and has attracted a substantial, loyal user base since then.

In the same period, Vizimo has been quietly developing ‘next generation guidance’ solutions: intelligent, interactive, guidance technology that enables viewers to find, discover, manage and watch TV or video programmes that they are interested in.  Vizimo’s solutions make use of sources that include broadcast TV, on-demand and catch-up services, Internet TV and mobile video services, and are designed engage viewers with a genuinely personalised guide that works coherently across TV, web and mobile.

TIOTI’s approach proved to be innovative and it made significant strides in terms of the social aspects of content discovery and guidance.  This is a great fit with Vizimo’s approach to content discovery which relies on Vizimo’s underlying technology for content analysis. The TIOTI proposition will be able to use Vizimo’s technology to enhance its proposition, while Vizimo will be able to extend the range of capabilities on offer to partners through leveraging some of TIOTI’s social capabilities.

Simon Steward, CEO of Vizimo, said: “A shop window is by far the best way of demonstrating to the whole TV ecosystem – broadcasters, content owners, device manufacturers, mobile operators, publishers and even existing guides – what they could be doing if they elected to incorporate functionality such as recommendation and personalisation into their own offering, fronted by their own brand.”

“Meanwhile we get to measure customer reaction to functionality, which aids the development and refinement process; TIOTI customers get a really valuable and entertaining service from us; TIOTI will also extend the range of capabilities that Vizimo can offer partners on the B2B side; and the ecosystem gets a view of the whole process,” he said.

Steward explained why Vizimo’s developments are crucial for the TV ecosystem.  “If users can watch anything at any time on any device, how do they decide what to watch?  Existing TV guides for broadcast content - such as EPGs [electronic programme guides] on set-top boxes or TV listings in newspapers, magazines and on the web - are no longer relevant when consumers have access to content from so many sources and on multiple devices.  They need ‘next generation’ guidance, and that’s what Vizimo delivers,” he said.

An all-new TIOTI website, incorporating the latest developments from Vizimo, is expected to replace the current site within three months. Existing TIOTI users will be entirely unaffected by the acquisition, save for having access to exciting new functionality such as ‘personalisation’ and ‘recommendation’.