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Clicker is Your Complete Guide for Internet Television

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You missed that recent episode of V or the first episode of CSI’s crossover week. You know they aren’t showing re-runs and you can’t believe you forgot to set the DVR. Maybe you can catch them online, but where? Clicker is a service that will help you answer that exact question: Where are the shows I want to see playing online?

As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers are entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Great! Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed among billions of random clips and videos.

Clicker boasts more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks. They also contain 40,000 movies and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists. They refer to themselves as “one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR.”

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Clicker3Clicker basically indexes video from various sources across the web. Rather than trying to sift through YouTube, Hulu, or other video sites, Clicker serves as your one-stop shop for locating exactly what you need. When possible, you can even watch your shows right from the Clicker website. Otherwise, it links you to the relevant source.

Even if the content you’re looking for is not free, Clicker will show you where you can buy it. The search features auto-complete and thumbnails of the shows you might be searching for. If you’re not even sure what you’re looking for, you can browse through the extensive selection of categories or visit Trends to see what’s hot.

As you browse through the site, you can add items to playlists for later viewing. This works much like Hulu’s queue, including a history of items you’ve already watched. You can also connect Clicker to your Facebook account to let your friends know what you’re watching and to invite 5 lucky people to join the service. Clicker is in private beta, but it only took me a few days to get my invitation, so go sign up and let us know what you think.

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Hulu Adds Continuous Play So I Can Watch ALL of Naruto

There is one feature that I’ve always expected to see on Hulu, but finally figured out that it didn’t exist. Let’s say you want to watch Naruto Shippunden, but you don’t want to just watch a couple of episodes. You want to watch all of it. From episode 1 season 1 to episode 126 season 4. You had to add each individual episode to your queue in order. That’s 126 clicks! More if you count scrolling through episodes and seasons. I’m no UI expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s bad design. Where is the “Select All” button at?!

Well, it looks like Hulu was aware of this flaw and has recently fixed it. Continuous play makes it simple to watch sequential episodes of any show on Hulu. No need to add each episode to your queue. Just find the show you like and click turn Continuous Play on. You can click “Show Playlist” so see what episodes are included, hover “Next Video to see what’s coming next, and (when the credits start rolling) click “Next Video” to skip to the next video.

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Now on every video player on our site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists. One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier. The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously. The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching. If you’re watching a bit from Saturday Night Live, the playlist will be “Saturday Night Live” and will play more sketches from SNL in sequential order. If you’re watching an episode of 30 Rock, Continuous Play will play more episodes of 30 Rock in sequential order.

This feature will make it even easier to waste hours of your life. You click play once and disappear for as long as you like.

What do you think about Continuous Play? Were you craving it as much as I was? Leave a comment.

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