Spider: What is PiTV?

PiTV: PiTV is a hybrid media centre that brings all the multimedia and vast internet contents to your big screen TV. Capable of playing almost any audio and video file formats, it allows connections to a full range of devices such as hard drives, external storages, networked clients, and others alike.

It has a built-in search engine which allows you to find and download the latest content, be it movies or TV shows. Using the subscriptions module you can subscribe to all your favourite TV shows. The content you have subscribed to will be downloaded automatically and available for viewing on your TV very shortly after it is aired. You can also opt to download old episodes from the archived sources.

In addition to this, the search engine also catalogues all new and popular movies so that you can easily download and view them. All this is tied together with a rich user interface, which provides you with a digital library of your content, complete with ratings, fan art and plot lines. You can view your content by year, genre and more. You can even view trailers of movies before you download them.

In short you’ll never need to visit a DVD store, and always be assured that you’re getting a good print that’s not going to conk out at the most crucial part of a movie!

Spider: What challenges did you face in introducing the service?

PiTV: The concept of on-demand entertainment that is downloaded over the internet is quite new for the Pakistani market. People are hesitant to try new technologies. Keeping this in mind we’ve tried to make the user interface very simple and easy to use, even for people who are not very tech savvy. We feel the biggest challenge is to make the consumer try the product. Our experience shows once a user starts using PiTV, they become addicted to it!

Spider: Does the Pakistani government offer any incentives in this market? Or are they still blissfully ignorant about the concept of entertainment through the internet?

PiTV: We’re not sure if they are offering any incentives, but we did this using our own resources.

Spider: Are there any local competitors? How would you rate your services as compared to theirs?

PiTV: Obviously there are competing products, but we feel none of them offer the same experience that our product does. PiTV has been designed as an entertainment centre for everyone, not just techies! It’s simple enough to be used by people of all ages, yet it’s powerful enough to offer all the features one would expect from a good entertainment centre. The key advantage is the search engine which makes it as simple as a click and go to find and download content. The other products offer no such service, and the user has to find content on their own, which can be a pretty daunting task. We filter out all the junk, and let you sit and enjoy the best content!

Spider: Internet penetration in Pakistan is still quite low, how big a market do you think exists here?

PiTV: We feel that is rapidly changing. There are more than 2.5 million internet connections in the country, and the users are significantly more. Obviously it is low compared to the population of the country, but year after year one is seeing exponential growth. Also broadband coverage is no more limited to the urban areas, more and more towns are being connected to the internet.

Spider: Does PiTV require constant connectivity to the internet? What would be the recommended connection speed?

PiTV: PiTV only requires internet connectivity to download the content, once it’s been downloaded you can watch it offline as well. Obviously the better the connection the better the experience, but we’ve built it keeping Pakistan in mind. So downloads are very resilient. If the internet connection goes down for any reason, or the PiTV box itself restarts due to power failure, it recovers the download from where it left off. So no time is wasted. If you have a good connection (2Mbp+) you can download a typical TV show episode within fifteen to twenty minutes. And while you watch one the second one can download in the background. We’ve built in features which auto download new episodes as they come out, and this usually happens early in the morning, so even if your connection is slow it generally is not a problem, as most users don’t watch TV till later in the day.

Spider: PiTV offers a wide range of shows and movies, what other services/channels do you plan on introducing?

PiTV: We’re looking into other categories as well, but it will be mostly entertainment related. That could mean something like sports, or documentaries. We’ll see how it goes based on feedback from our consumers.

Spider: Do you offer any packages or discounts to your consumers?

PiTV: Please refer to our Facebook page for this.

Spider: We have not witnessed much marketing for PiTV, why so?

PiTV: We’re just in our soft launch phase; we also feel the best form of advertising is word of mouth! So you can expect to hear more about us as our user base grows.

Spider: Do you own the server that helps in downloading the content? Is it public or peer-to-peer like torrents?

PiTV: PiTV does not host any content; all content is from public sources.

Spider: To sum it all up, how much scope do you see in Pakistan for services such as PiTV?

PiTV: We are very excited about the future of PiTV-like services in Pakistan. We think people are always looking for new avenues for entertainment, and PiTV’s slogan is “Easy, Instant, Entertainment!” So we’re going to try and deliver that.