The little TV Guide booklet by the grocery checkout has grown up, gotten bigger, and now launched an online video search service to challenge Google, YouTube and Netflix. Seems TV Guide realizes there is a problem in the search market: more people than ever before are watching video via cable, DVDs, TiVo, mail envelopes, iTunes, YouTube, and whatever else crams inside your web browsers -- but it's dang hard to search for professional video content.
You got the flat-panel. Now, how easy is it to really "pull" good video to it instantly?
Ain't easy. A search at Google for "CSI" turns up the official site, ads, video review pages, and real government agencies. Not a lot of watchable video. Allen Weiner over at Gartner notes there is a huge disconnect between video search and viewing habits. Pew says 76% of viewers A18-29 watch video online. YouTube gives us 1:57 clips of Jim Carrey looking like Caruso. So where is CSI?
TV Guide's Online Video Guide will push viewers first to free content of the actual shows, and then to professional episodes you may need to pay for and amateur videos popular enough to make the grade. This should accelerate the growth of tvguide.com, which had 4.9 million visitors in August vs. only 3.2 million subscribers to the print form. In a competitive twist, the online guide allows you to specify whether you only want free content -- setting TV Guide apart from those dastardly iTunes and Amazon Unbox, which make you pay.
Now, if someone would just build a simple remote control to run all this.
0 comments:
Post a Comment