Clicker Clicker hopes to be the search engine for video online.When Viacom announced this week that it would pull “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” from Hulu, the popular video hosting site, many online video viewers were understandably upset. Even though the videos won’t disappear from the Internet and will still be viewable on each show’s Web site, moves like this continue to fragment content online, making it more difficult for consumers to navigate a growing diaspora of video.
Clicker, with a Web site redesign it unveiled on Thursday, hopes to guide viewers to the shows they want.
The company, which recently closed an $11 million series B round of funding, announced a series of new features on the site’s home page, including “Headliners,” which showcases important shows and breaking-news videos online, and “Trending,” which identifies which TV shows, movies and Web original videos are quickly rising in popularity.
In an interview, Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Clicker, said, “It’s not about when it’s on anymore. It’s about what’s on and where you can find it.”
Clicker currently amasses a tremendous amount of video scheduling and programming information, covering more than 50,000 movies, 50,000 music videos and 10,000 shows that expand into 1,400 categories.
“Navigating the amount of content on the Web is impossible,” Mr. Lanzone said. “The standard programming interfaces on your TV won’t work anymore. There is just far too much content, and it’s essentially a world of infinite video on-demand.”
With Clicker’s latest design, the company hopes to move closer to offering a next-generation programming guide that isn’t a schedule and can change dynamically based on a number of different events, categories and playlists.
But the quest to categorize and conquer video online is also rife with competition. Clicker is going up against a number of video guide sites, including Blinkx, Truveo and SideReel.
It’s likely that more network TV shows will move away from video hosting sites like Hulu as the networks try to hold on to their brand identities online.
“Some of these companies have a conflict with video distribution online, but they also have brands that they’ve spent decades cultivating and creating value around,” Mr. Lanzone said. “Everyone is experimenting right now, and we hope to point, in an unbiased way, to video content online, no matter where it sits.”