Content may be king -- but in an era of unlimited entertainment options, being the person who can help consumers decide just how they find said content has its upside, too.
That seems to be the operating philosophy of Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Barry Diller's Ask.com. After leaving Ask in 2008, Lanzone re-emerged last fall to launch Clicker.com, a site which makes it easy to find out where your favorite TV shows (and other video content) live online.
Clicker, with offices in both Silicon Alley and LA, boasts a massive database of more than 650,000 TV episodes from 10,000 shows. It'll even tell you where you can find both full-length episodes of "The Facts of Life" and the cut-down "minisodes" of said series.
TheWrap's Josef Adalian recently caught up with Lanzone to grill him for a progress report on Clicker, find out how the networks are responding to his site and get some insight as to the future of online viewing:
In 10 words or less, describe Clicker.com.
Clicker is the complete programming guide for Internet television. (GQ described us is in fewer words: "TV Guide for Internet television." But I don't want to namedrop. Yes I do.)
Other than having some spare cash to invest, what prompted you to create the site?
After leaving IAC/Ask in 2008, I was an "entrepreneur-in-residence" at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, which means I was basically paid to work on new ideas and evaluate other ones. They had previously funded disruptive new media companies like TiVo and Netflix.
Online TV was just starting to emerge as a real category, and one new idea we had was literally "TV Guide for the Web." What would that look like in this new era of infinite VOD, where the question isn't when things are on, but what's on and where you can find it when it's fragmented across hundreds of thousands (and eventually millions) of host sites? That looks like a search and database problem, which was right in the wheelhouse for my team. So we raised $8 million in venture capital and jumped.
Do you see Clicker as a future replacement of on-screen program guides as more and more viewing moves from watching via cable to watching via broadband -- even if folks do it on a connected 50-inch plasma vs. their laptop?
One-hundred percent yes. Our goal is to be the number one way you navigate programming in the future, regardless of what device you're on. ... The lines are blurring between all of these devices and technologies. In the near future it will not be "50-inch plasma vs. your laptop," but your laptop will be the remote control, wirelessly beaming your laptop screen directly to your plasma. That's when the fun really starts. Darwinism is definitely hard at work in this category.
Are the networks cooperating with Clicker? Do they get your potential role?
Again, 100 percent yes. The reason content owners and distributors like Clicker is that we are Switzerland in this space, attempting to build a comprehensive, organized, and unbiased way to navigate and discover programming.
