Since pretty much the day we launched, we’ve had a steady stream of requests from people who wanted to use Clicker on their big screens, but frankly couldn’t read anything when they tried. Not without squinting, at least.
It’s true. Clicker.com was made for the 2-foot experience, with lots of info on each show or episode page. The design is awesome (it was nominated for a Best Design Crunchie, ok?), but it’s not what you’d call “remote friendly” for those using it from 10-feet away.
With our Boxee app, launched in December at their ragin’ beta party, we had our first 10-foot experience for Clicker, navigable with your remote or arrow keys. It’s great, but limited to Boxee users, of course. What about everyone else?
Today we’re introducing the first iteration of a big screen experience for Clicker.com itself: Clicker.tv.
It’s fast. It has nice big icons. It’s navigable simply with keystrokes or a remote. It has the look and feel of a rich application. And you can see it from across the room. But you don’t need to hook anything up or download anything to get it. Just go to http://www.clicker.tv. The coolest part of Clicker.tv is the fact that it’s “just” a website and it works in any browser.
That last part is why the Google Chrome team asked us to debut the product at the I/O conference today. It was built largely through the use of HTML5, and is an example of the cool new “apps” that can be built native to the browser, without downloads or plugins. We’re really proud of our engineering team for their next-gen work! And we appreciate the Google guys acknowledging it.
The future of Internet television is going to be written over a long period of time. You can’t precisely predict it and there won’t be one answer. There will be tablets and tv’s, boxes and apps, subscription services and free ones. Its strength will come from this diversity of content and connections. As Americans we already watch 37 hours of TV a week. I have no idea how we’re going to fit more viewing hours into each week, but we’re going to be given every possible freaking opportunity to try!
One of those connection choices will inevitably be watching over the open Web, using a really big 50-inch “monitor” that’s hanging on your wall instead of your laptop or desktop, and choosing from all the content the Web has to offer rather than There are already millions of consumers taking this approach, despite the fact that it takes a lot of effort. Watching TV this way is about to get a lot easier this year, including wireless options that beam one screen to another. We’ve seen some of them and they’re mind-bogglingly effective and easy to use.
For those of you taking this 10-foot/50-inch approach, we invite you to check out Clicker.tv and use it as your programming guide for Internet TV. As always, your feedback is appreciated. Email us, tweet us or hit us up on Facebook. This is a first draft and we’ll work quickly to incorporate your suggestions.
