Boxee Support Now, Netflix Soon
The only things more numerous than remote controls and change in the couch cushions are videos on the Web. Clicker.com is offering a digital Video Guide to help consumers find what they want to watch.
It has launched a beta of its video search engine that aspires to index all of the movies, TV shows and videos available on the Web and arrange them by network, genre and show name.
Clicker VP of product management Ryan Massie said the company aims to be "source agnostic" and provide links to everywhere the content is legally available on the Web. The company starts with the original content owner, say NBC or Fox, and then points to other locations like Hulu.
At the beta launch, its index consisted of around 300,000 episodes of 5,200 TV shows on 1,200 networks; 1,200 movies; and 50,000 music videos.
According to Massie, over 50% of the videos indexed are available for streaming on the Clicker site itself through an embedded player. The major networks tend to embed less than studios that develop content specifically for the Web, but a large chunk of content from the majors is available on Clicker, thanks mostly to an embedded Hulu player.
The company plans to develop in three main stages:
- First it’s aiming at content online. This will aim at Web properties as well as platforms where content is free, legal and Net-based.
- Second is a shift to adding rental and subscription services. The company said Netflix is coming soon and it’ll be indexing those 14,000 or so streaming titles. This could mean direct Netflix renting and streaming through Clicker. Amazon VOD is also being considered.
- Third is the addition of purchasable content. The partner goal here is iTunes. Clicker can already navigate to free content offered by Apple’s service, but this step will venture into allowing users to search for and purchase content. It’ll also likely expand any deal with Amazon.com at this point to include its available purchases.
The service has a deal with Boxee, which means it’ll be on a lot of TVs from day one of its official launch. For now, only services that already work with Boxee will be directly viewable from the Clicker client. Massie said they’re staying out of the Hulu-Boxee scuffle, but since this Clicker can only directly show a small selection of Hulu’s content it would be a smart place for Hulu to test out a TV presence.
Clicker.com showing its title, category and media searches
Digging In
The initial run-through of the service went well, but continued usage could depend on what content the user is looking for.
The search is clean and if a user is looking for a specific show, it can often be found in a list that appears near the search bar while the user is typing.
TV content pointed to and listed by the site comes from almost every studio, though movies are slightly more limited. Content comes from, to name a small selection, Sony Pictures and its online Crackle offering, BBC and BBC America, six Fox stations, CNN, Comcast’s Fancast, HBO, AOL, Disney and its ABC channels, MTV and Blip.tv. It even points at Joost, which is still up and running for the time being.
Clicker is at the mercy of studios for what content is embedded and what isn’t, so the ability to accurately list content by genre and category is key. And here the service is spot on. There few, if any, out-of-place shows and films, and there were even listings for content we hadn’t seen online before.
For some of the Web sites that Clicker partners with but only links to, it’s actually easier to navigate to specific episodes on Clicker and then jump to the other portal.
Because it’s the Web and content deals are always changing, there are a couple of videos pointed to that are no longer available. Hulu seems to have the most of these, and the Hulu Web site itself lists that content as available until the user clicks "play."
Perhaps the most interesting content on Clicker is its music selection. The service covers 26 genres and a wide variety of content, from traditional music videos and interviews to recorded sessions and studio time.
Clicker's Boxee interface, organizing Web content for the TV set.
Users can watch music videos from The Beatles from MTV Music and then switch to recorded studio performances of new artists coming from KCRW, a radio station in Los Angeles that also records video of its live guests.
The service also has some sharing and playlist features that will likely get beefed up before it officially launches.
The Challengers
Clicker debuted its service at the TechCrunch 50 event and said it has raised $8 million in funding.
It’s going to need all of that funding to grab hold of the market, because it has some major competition.
The biggest name is Rovi, formerly Macrovision, which owns the TV Guide database and is cooking up a guide that also indexes Web and cable TV content. Rovi is aiming this squarely at the TV set so far, with existing deals with Vizio, Sony, TiVo and a few other CE makers, as well as a cornucopia of broadcast partners from Foxtel and Kabel Deutschland to Canal+ and Portugal Telecom.
By staying Web-based, Clicker will avoid a lot of direct competition, but the future of all this content is going to be on the TV set, either directly or through a set-top box, so a head-to-head confrontation is coming down the road.
Another big player in the market is the Axel Springer and Philips venture called Aprico. Aprico’s software allows users to build personal "channels" of both broadcast TV shows and Internet videos. The channels are automatically and continuously updated by the product’s intelligence and self-learning capabilities.
Microsoft added Aprico to its Media Center, using the guide to develop My Personal TV Digital. TVBLOB and eventIS officially announced deals with Aprico this month. This too feels very TV-centered right now, so Clicker has a little time to beef up before taking on Aprico.
The most direct competitor is probably is FastForward (www.ffwd.com). The FastForward service works on the Wii and lists a lot of content partners, but Clicker’s search and user interface beat FastForward hands down for every search and piece of content we tried them on.
Clicker is easy to use and points to content in a straightforward and intelligent manner. For a user who wants his PC to replace his TV set, or at least cable TV, Clicker is a perfect service.
As it and others navigate their way to user interaction on the TV set, Clicker will be going up against some heavy hitters that are getting built in. The best thing for the service, then, will be to keep improving on its search engine and continue branching out into premium and made-for-Web programming. Presenting these both on an equal footing will provide what a lot of consumers are looking for. |
