Clicker – The Complete Guide To Online TV & Movie Shows

Another online movie and TV site? Hmmm, yes…but Clicker seems to stand apart from the crowd (and it’s a swarm!).

In their own words, Clicker positions itself as – one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR.

In short, Clicker tries to be the sum of lots of parts. I guess it tries to take the best search experience and match it with an online viewing experience à la Hulu. The ultimate goal is to be the last stop (or at least a necessary one) for online TV entertainment where you can view TV shows online.

So let’s explore the parts and arrive at the sum.

Clicker As A Search Engine

Unlike a generic video search engine or even Google Search, Clicker does not trawl the entire web for your video. What it does is look into its massive itemized database and return very relevant results. Clicker has cataloged 6,000 shows with a total of over 450,000 episodes. It follows 1,200 networks. Not only TV episodes, Clicker has indexed 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists along with thousands of movies.

The search engine is very friendly as it displays close suggestions when we type in the name of a show. The results page returns all available videos as well as media reports from other news and entertainment channels. Filters to sort the results make narrowing down on the one to watch quite easy. For the sake of organization, you can create a playlist of your shows which update automatically as more shows become available online.

Related videos i.e. shows which are similar to the one you are searching for, also offer interesting finds.

Clicker As A Directory

A better top down approach to explore a genre would be use the directory organization of the site. You can start from Shows by Title, browse them By Source or By Show. You can also go to them using the huge scrollable Shows by Category list. Shows by Media lets you filter result by TV Shows, Web Originals, Movies and Music. Within each, the Trending section features what’s hot and current on the site.

Clicker As A Wiki

Each show or episode has the gist with it. You have a brief description, pictures, cast members info, ratings, external links, related shows etc. You can also add your own two bits in the form of memorable quotes, other tidbits and even edit the main description to something more fitting.

Clicker As A Video Player

A click on Watch Now and you are taken to the hosting site where you can view TV shows online. Remember, Clicker does not host the content itself but merely acts as an indexer to all the content that’s online. So, viewer restriction policies might apply for some shows. For instance, some (like shows in Hulu) may not be viewable by people outside certain geographical areas like the U.S. Or for instance, to view Netflix movies, you must have a Netflix account. Depending on the terms of use (like, Free), some shows can be viewed on the site’s embedded player.

Clicker As An Entertainment Guide

The huge database itself is an entertainment station. Clicker keeps everything indexed with what’s running offline and online. New shows get added and if you have a playlist, it gets updated automatically. Clicker has source partners from YouTube to Amazon, from internet streaming movies to VOD for-purchase movies. On the homepage itself you can directly go to what’s new, what’s hot and shows that are recommended.

The Sum Of All Parts

Arranging all that mine of information itself is a huge challenge and Clicker does it seamlessly. The search doesn’t overwhelm the user with thousands of mish-mashed results like a general search engine but delivers trimmed down, on the button results. The content is indexed well as felt from the fast auto-suggestions and the search results. The site seems to be updated frequently as I didn’t get a dropped link. That’s an incredible achievement when you have a site which has content drawn from so many different sources.

One or two additions down the line would surely help. For instance, you can sort the videos by popularity but there doesn’t seem to be a rating system like we see in IMDB. Links to critic comments would also help.

The site has just come out of beta and so it’s still going to be a work in progress and the blog says that very thing.

But first impressions surely will make you keep clicking.