SetJam, Clicker enter hypercompetitive online TV-guide market
Start-up SetJam officially took its online TV guide service out of a seven-week private beta at the Web 2.0 Expo taking place in New York today. The company is entering a new, but increasingly hypercompetitive market already populated with giants like TV Guide and Fancast, as well as new entrants including Yidio, Rippol, CastTV and MovieMonitor and Clicker, both of which also launched within the past week.
SetJam founder and CEO Ryan Janssen realizes the competitive environment he is jumping into, but said he saw a need to address the growing number of legally available TV shows and movies online. He formed SetJam to do that and that alone. SetJam created an easy to use, specialized search engine that it says makes “the largest library of full-length TV shows and movies in the world as easy to watch as traditional TV.” Janssen said the company played with features and alternative content, but reduced it to just the premium content consumers know and want to find.
“Those of us in technology and comfortable with the Internet and [who] use it all the time don’t understand how bewildering this whole era of online TV is for people,” Janssen said. “For us, it was about simplifying.”
Consumers type in the name of a show into a simple search box and are then taken to a page that lists every episode from first to last with links to view each episode. The results are organized in a grid based on the business model – free, pay-per-view or subscription – and the destination site. The site has more than 22,000 indexed broadcast TV series, nearly 1,500 of which can be watched instantly and 900 for free. Of those, each series has an average of 50 episodes. SetJam also catalogues 12,000 movies, of which 700 are free, Jenssen said.
What SetJam does not do is frame the content on its own site or use advertising to support its business, relying instead on affiliates. Janssen said SetJam is also nearly twice as efficient as its competitors at speeding the length of time between when a user selects a show to actual watching it.
By virtue of their sites and proximity of launch dates, SetJam has been most often compared to Clicker Media, launched on Thursday. Clicker, which counts Sling Media co-founder Blake Krikorian as an investor and board member, is taking a more comprehensive approach to navigating broadcast-quality programming online. The service, in private beta since September, includes an index of more than 400,000 full episodes from 1,200 sources. It also boasts 30,000 Netflix and Amazon video on-demand movies and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists. Consumers can use the service to record entire seasons, receive alerts when new episodes of shows are available and integrate with Facebook Connect. Clicker also provides learning-based recommendations for shows to search and drills down to find, for example, a certain guest on a talk show.
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