Sites I like: Clicker.com
ByA tweet from Scribegrrrl tipped me off to Clicker.com, an interesting just-out-of-beta site that bills itself as “the complete guide to Internet Television.”
Started by “a passionate team of TV-loving freaks with search engine, media, data and content management backgrounds,” Clicker.com is “one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR [and] contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.”
You can easily browse videos by type of content (TV, movies, web originals and music) as well as genre (drama, comedy, action, etc.). Some of the videos are embedded, but many listings link off to other sites (e.g. the Buffy the Vampire Slayer listing sends you to TheWB.com).
There are internet video sites like NewTeeVee.com and TubeFilter.com that review and/or feature original web series; sites like Hulu that only feature online video related to network TV content; and sites like YouTube that include all of the above as well as soft porn, fan videos, and video blogs.
But this is the first I’ve come across that focuses on aggregating all “television or television-quality” web video, regardless of who produced it, and it most likely won’t be the last.
A site like Clicker.com would seem to be at a significant competitive disadvantage to popular and well-funded sites like Hulu and YouTube. But the diversity and huge volume of videos on YouTube is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness (it’s easy to get overwhelmed when searching for something, and the increasing number of spam videos are annoying), and as popular as Hulu is, they’re held hostage by Hollywood’s profitable but confusing to consumers windowing strategy which makes content available on Hulu only at certain times (Hulu includes some independent web series, but buries them beneath the studio content).
Hulu expects these windows to “converge over time,” but until then, there’s a gap to be filled by sites like Clicker.com.
And I’m on board with any site that helps me find ways to watch the web series Anyone But Me, a Feist music video, episodes of Lincoln Heights, and The Secret of NIMH.
O My Goddess!
Awesome. Such a pity that episodes on Hulu, ABC Family, WB and probably a few others are unavailable to those of us outside the US. Guess the Buffy monster box set is still the way to go.
Fringe is available online!??!?! Clicker, I love you.