Clicker’s Guide to Online Video

By  |  Monday, September 14, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Clicker LogoI’ve lost track of how many search engines have claimed to be a TV Guide for Web video, or have been described as such by others. This morning at TechCrunch50, another contender joined the fray: Clicker, which is headed by former Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone. It’s focused on professional content (content from broadcast TV, cable, and some Web-only items); aims to know more than competitors about the shows it finds to make it easier to find programs you’ll like (such as whether they’re comedies or dramas); embeds shows from Hulu, network sites, and other sources; and lets you maintain a personal library of shows so you can come back and watch your favorites.

Looks useful and straightforward enough, but it’s hard to judge until it’s open for business–which it isn’t yet. Here’s a video walkthrough:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3419185&w=425&h=350&fv=loc%3D%252F%26autoplay%3Dfalse%26vid%3D2162433]

Sites like Clicker are going to be important, unless Google and other garden-variety search providers add enough video-specific features to render them superfluous. But to me, the biggest problem with TV shows online isn’t that they’re hard to find, but that too much of the good stuff just isn’t available yet. I’m looking forward to the day when just about anything that’s ever aired on TV in episodic form is available online–including scads of items that never made it to DVD. When that happens–and I’m convinced it will–we’ll really need Clicker or something comparable…

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Jason Mancebo Says:
    September 14th, 2009 at 2:21 pm

    HI Harry.

    I’d question if you might be in the chicken or egg mode in thinking about Clicker. I DO think there is a significant amount of content out there that’s available, but I just don’t have any idea where to find most of it, and if I do know, then two things are issues:

    1) Finding stuff inside the site (youtube, vimeo, hulu, etc, etc)
    2) Dragging myself around to ALL the dang sites of each of the content owners (a la the TBS example of Seinfeld that Jim mentioned this AM ..I’m not thinking TBS when I think Seinfeld for some reason 😉

    I’m not involved with Clicker at all, but I’d like to be..and DO think they have implemented one excellent idea….and I’d really like to see OPGs in EVERYTHING rethink what they are doing and be more along the lines of Clicker. Perhaps if TV Guide would use clicker, they’d ease their woes. Not sure, but viewers would surely like more options.

  2. Bastien Says:
    September 14th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    That’s gonna put a lot of really bad tv out there to be watched again.

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