On-demand video over the internet has been on the horizon for years and although we can find endless content online, and watch it on our PCs or laptops, this isn’t the way that this content will find a mass market. There needs to be a simple way to get IP video onto the TV.

If you’re a tech-savvy early adopter then there are ways to do this, of course. You can connect up your laptop via the TV’s PC input or you can build a media centre PC. You could even buy Apple’s iTV. But with most of the options there’s a small but, ultimately, show-stopping limitation. The PC-connected-to-the-TV option ends up being very frustrating and has what’s become known on tech forums as a low GAF or WAF (girlfriend or wife acceptance factor).

There’s no easy remote control option and you probably don’t want to have a Bluetooth keyboard on the sofa with you, if the computer isn’t a dedicated media device then it will inevitably be used for something at a key moment and no one really want to wait while their TV starts up or reboots. Most of all, we don’t want to ever have to get off the sofa to get the system working.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the steady progress of the big TV operators who are getting close to the ‘watch anything any time’ promise of on-demand. But coming from left-field there are the games consoles, which have some useful plus points. For a start they are connected to the TV, and now many of us have connected ours to the net to play online games. The Wii even has a wireless remote control as standard and tends to be in the living room given its family focus.

Sony and Microsoft have had video services in the market for a while now. Sony’s first foray was to turn the PS3 into a software PVR. In the UK, Microsoft and BT have partnered to allow Xbox users to access BT Vision’s on-demand content. But it’s the massive success of Nintendo’s Wii platform, which hit 2 million sales last month, that looks set to establish the games console in this market. BBC’s iPlayer service is available via the Wii’s built-in browser in the UK but it’s the recently announced family-focussed TV service due go live in Japan early this year, and which will feature original content, that signals Nintendo’s intentions.

With millions of devices connected to TVs and the internet, it’s starting to look like Nintendo could succeed in creating a mass market on-demand platform where those new entrants not connected to the TV, like Joost, are struggling.

We are pleased to have concluded our acquisition of TIOTI. We have been long-time fans of Paul Cleghorn and his views on the evolution of TV. For anyone who is not familiar with TIOTI, have a look at this promo video and feel free to look around the site.

While Vizimo has invested substantial effort into enabling content discovery through automated analysis of content, we’ve always been firm believers in the power of social recommendation. The best recommendations invariably come from friends who know what we like and whose tastes we respect. TIOTI has made fantastic progress towards enabling socially driven discovery of what to watch and we were excited by the prospects of boosting this with our analytical capability. Our objective is now to evolve the current site towards providing an unparalleled view of up-coming TV as well as historical TV content.

We’ve already launched an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, called TIOTI TV+ (available on the App Store). The app provides a view of what’s on TV, enables users to remotely set a PVR (Sky+ only at the moment), provides links to related iPlayer content and other viewing recommendations.

Watch this space.