By: Jim | Twitter

Posted: September 14, 2009 - 12:29 pm

“There’s a lot of free video on the Internet these days, and you don’t need to go spelunking on BitTorrent to find it. But it’s not always obvious where to get high-quality versions of TV shows and movies.” — Liz Gannes, “Where’s Our TVGuide For the Web?”, NewTeeVee, August 6, 2009

Welcome to Clicker.  We’ve been hard at work for the past nine months building our first draft of the ultimate programming guide for Internet television.  We’re thrilled to have our beta testers along for the last few weeks of our journey to full launch.

The last generation of television was so simple in retrospect. Shows were on at certain times. You used a schedule grid to find a show, and either watched it at the appointed time, or recorded it with your DVR.

The expansion from three networks to 500 cable channels was nowhere near as dramatic as the current shift to online-delivered content.  We’re entering a world of nearly infinite video-on-demand: on big media sites and smaller independent sites, behind paid walls like iTunes and Netflix, through operating systems from Boxee to Xbox, and across every device you own, from your iPhone to your real TV.

That’s tens of thousands of hours of possible programming to navigate. What this generation needs to manage their viewing habits isn’t a schedule, it’s an atlas!

That’s where we come in. Clicker aims to provide the most comprehensive, unbiased and user-friendly way to navigate what’s available (and just as importantly, what’s not) to watch online, where and when you can find it, and finally, what’s worth watching amongst your infinite choices.  We have made it our mission to make it dead simple for you to find the RIGHT SHOW, RIGHT NOW.

To accomplish this, Clicker is a hybrid of many other kinds of information and entertainment sites: one part directory, one part search engine, one part Wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR.  At the heart of it all is a massive structured database, created by a team of people from search, media, data and content management backgrounds.

From day one, Clicker has mapped more than 300,000 episodes, from over 5,200 shows, from over 1,200 networks – in addition to 1,200 movies (soon to be 14,000 movies with the addition of Netflix), and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists. All of this programming is organized by episode, show, network, media type, title, and artist, as well as over 1,000 categories and sub-categories.

While in beta, we’ll be doing more than just working out the kinks.

We’ll also:

– Continue to expand our coverage of shows across all forms of online media: TV, Movies, Web Originals and Music
– Delve even deeper into television and television-quality programming from non-fiction topic categories such as Travel,        Home & Garden, Sports, and Live Events
– Introduce recommendations that will hopefully feel like we’re reading your mind
– Expand to cover paid content from sources such as iTunes and Netflix
– Let you access Clicker in more places, from your iPhone to your TV
– Open the doors so you, our users, can add and edit the information on Clicker for every show or episode
– Make Clicker more social with features so you can share and discover great programs

If you’d like to use Clicker during beta, click here to request an invite.

We’re also on Twitter and Facebook so please follow us!

If you have any questions or issues with activating your account, please contact help@clicker.com for assistance.

Thanks and hello world!

Jim Lanzone
CEO