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Daily Critique – Clicker Vs CastTV

In a long battle that has been waned for years, video aggregation has been a hard spot in the search cloud. Many have tried, few have been acquired, but none have ever succeeded in finishing the mission of being able to search the vast cloud we call the internet and return the very best/relevant content of what we’re looking for in the video portal. And so the battle rages on even to today with a new start-up right from the TechCrunch50 event called Clicker. While we waited for our beta invite to begin a comparison between this very start-up and the number one video aggregator, who currently holds the fort of video search- CastTV, we looked back at the bloody battle and refreshed our memory of the many who have perished and very fight Clicker will have to win the crown in video search…

I can now announce we just received our beta invite from Clicker and we’re ready to do a comparison on both sites and see which site offers more content and who’s better at finding such media. We’ll break down a few key points here for both sites and see which one will be able to charge ahead in this on going battle, for the stakes are high and the winnings higher, to take the crown and own the domain of video search…

Not so long ago, before CastTV even entered the marketplace for gathering and listing videos based on an algorithmic set of equations, another video site was already there archiving videos and listing them into one large playlist, Truveo. Truveo  launched in January of 2006 with a basic site idea of grabbing videos via RSS feeders or crawling the web. Not too long afterward (like in days) of the launch and post, AOL acquired them for a certain amount of stock options. Truveo until very recently was getting hit with 3 million uniques a month. This was mostly a milestone in the event that Google Video was already trying to archive videos from YouTube, which it recently had just acquired for 1.6B. This began an explosion of online video content and the beginning of finding a way to search for that content. But the task would be harder than most thought, and even the mighty G dropped the idea. Yikes!

But there was some major flaws with Truveo and anyone that used the site would know. The main flaw was the site would only archive the content, but never updated or checked to see anything that might have changed with that content. Many times videos that were listed no longer appeared from the source due to copyright issues or other unknown issues. Whatever the case, the videos were no longer available, but still archived by the video monster. Then stepped in CastTV…

Lets not forget first that there are others in the field and one which we also know of is Blinkx (Also Veoh was testing with this) . But I digress… So the idea behind CastTV was to search an even more broader video index and keep and up-to-date archive of videos available online. I will personally say that it took a long time for them to launch the site, but the results were well worth the wait. It keeps a pretty darn good record of archiving videos, even to some extent on odd searches it finds video off of YouTube that YT itself doesn’t list and usually before YT archives them for the YT search (Since it usually takes a few hours before the newly updated videos on YT get placed into the search index). CastTV today receives around 2 million uniques, and our guess is they have archived hundreds of thousands if not millions of videos.

CastTV uses a special crawler that not only grabs the video but also checks the tags, comments, and meta data around the video as well as check out any sites that may have the video embedded for further information about the video.
Our list we complied for the two sites and what we will be looking for when we start the comparison:

• User interface – Want to make sure the site is easy to use and detailed so the user can easily understand what actions can be taken. Also to note how the layout is and how easy it is to go from one page to another and change settings
• Content Availability – We’re going to do some query testing here by throwing in odd, old, or popular titles for shows/episodes and see which one returns the best results.
• User Input & Returns – And what I mean is, what comes back to us for recommendations to related shows or episodes.

With those guidelines in place, lets start over at the newly launched site Clicker and first lets take a look at the Home Page with User interface in mind:

As you can see from the picture on the left, and easy, noisy free page. Not too much overlaying here and very easy to look at. After we have logged in, this is the page you view. The blue buttons located at the top right will “Filter Results by Name”. You can easily click a letter or number and the page will reload displaying all the shows with whatever you pressed. Also listed on the Home Page is an div box listed Shows by Category and a Search box. For the simplicity of the layout and being able to easily go right to a show of your choosing by Name, Category, and or a direct search, we give 3 out of 5 critiques.

Now lets take a look at CastTV:

The CastTV Home Page shows the Top Viral videos, TV episodes, and Current News Clips. So the Home Page is designed for the user to click on something, anything that might interest them. Since CastTV also searches the internet for user uploaded  content, there is no Category section. So this is a minus for looking for videos that would fit into this niche. All the buttons and search options are hidden using javascript and div classes. We give CastTV 3 out of 5 as well, although the interface is more crowded, the option of showing users content will keep them there longer because of the distractions.

Now for the harder and more interesting part in the comparison, the search. What we want to accomplish here is two goals: one, we should be able to return a result for a show, no matter what the show is, it should be still listed in the database. Two, if the site does not have the show embedded on the site, the site should be able to link me to a place that has it and if the content I’m being redirected to is free or a fee.

Let’s try a show I enjoyed when I was younger, a Nickelodeon classic in it’s day (96): Rocko’s Modern Life. First lets see the results from Clicker:

This is interesting, Clicker has returned  a result for my search. Although it says there are no videos online (legally, which I’ll discuss later), it does give me a description of the show and some basic information about who owns the rights, etc. I also see on the right side a list of shows that are related to the genre/type of show I’m looking at.

“Programming Note: The distributor has not made any episodes available online yet. When they become legally available, we will list them here.”

After trying a few other searches we ran into an issue, nothing returned. We tried searching for The Oblongs and unfortunately nothing returned that was relevant. This is an issue that must be addressed when you reaching out to users who want results, and any results of what the show they are thinking of.  Giving the fact that they just launched, we can’t say that the show won’t be added soon, but when your targeting an audience with high expectations and on-demand results, you could pay the price. For this, we give 2 out of 5 critiques.

We’ll use the same searches and try CastTV. (We are aware that CastTV searches for ALL videos, legal or not, which may alter the results given)

We also found results for the show Rocko’s Modern Life, Interestingly it also shows us places to buy the episodes via iTunes or Amazon. There are also ads from Adsense on the right hand side which show relevant ads to the show, mostly links to where I could obtain the show from iTunes or an online retail store. This is where CastTV’s system breaks everything down, not only is it listing for me illegal videos of the show, but it’s also showing me where I can legally purchase/rent the show. It doesn’t break things down into Categories, but it does break them down into genres. We also typed in The Oblongs and it returned videos for the show. As for content availability, CastTV gets 4 out of 5 critiques because of it’s larger return for episodes and shows. 

Final thoughts and about what the users want

This is a hard one, because not only do you have to create a site that grabs the most recent videos on the web, but the effect to what is deemed legit or not. The biggest factor at play and what may not make Clicker is piracy. Although we applaud Clicker’s process of only archiving legal, legit, high quality, Hollywood produced content, the major setback is that many people are looking for videos, all videos to watch now, legal or not. Now I won’t go into what should be ironed out here and what actions people should take on the situation, but we know for a fact, many do not care about watching something from somewhere online,  that may not be 100% legal. It’s what made some of the biggest video portals on the web the way they are now, by pushing and hopping on the piracy boat. YouTube became the success it is today because of all the thousands of copyrighted works that made people go to the site. Even a site today which was built on nothing but piracy alone at the time, CrunchyRoll (Anime Video Portal), raised millions in backing because of the traffic it received.(We wont even go into MegaVideo) So the biggest issue in keeping the user base at Clicker will be the content availability. Since CastTV searches the entire internet for videos, leaving the copyright issues and DMCA up to the provider of the source to deal with the legal issues, they can target a much larger audience and can keep the user base more focused and returning again and again.

What we loved about Clicker is the way you an added videos to your playlist. Unlike CastTV, Clicker gives you more detailed results of the videos you added to your playlist as well as information like the air date, and season/episode number:

Ending Results:

Clicker can have a special advantage for providing users legal content to their TVs using the Boxee network over CastTV, which just specializes in web based video search, but it will be a hard climb to enter a crowded market by using only legit sources for categorizing videos. In the end, it will come down to do users really want to visit a site only dedicated to legal online videos or a video search already incorporating those videos?

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