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.

Ryan Massie, head of product management for Clicker, said the start-up’s mission is to be the complete programming guide for Internet TV. Clicker doesn’t want to be a Hulu, which is on one end of the spectrum in terms of offering programming on its site, or a search engine like Google on the other end of the spectrum simply spitting out search results, but aims to fit in between and help consumers seeking full episodes of broadcast or Web original content. Clicker also supports Boxee integration, and Massie said that the company will add more features as it goes, including a mobile app for the service.

“If you just want to watch premium episodes of broadcast or cable content or even premium Web content, you can come to our site,” Massie said. “A lot of other sites have a lot of user-generated content that’s very noisy. We also go a lot farther than many competitors. Some just have Amazon or Nextlix or Hulu, but we have over 1,000 in one space. We also have recommendations and related content as well. It’s a complete package.”

Different online programming sites are all playing up their unique takes on search and discovery. Some are aiming to be the entire portal, like Clicker, or a tool like SetJam. Others, such as Yidio, revolve around discovery through episode guides and social networking features while still others, like Rippol, draw heavily on recommendations. Even with their established angles, however, online search is shaping up to be a very competitive space. Jenssen pointed out that instead of consolidating, the online TV and video market is only getting larger and more fragmented as content owners build their own sites, cablecos explore online subscriptions and free sites continue to pop up. For this slew of start-ups, that is a good thing.

“The problem for users is ‘I don’t care; I can’t manage where this stuff is across 100 Web sites,’” Jenssen said. “It’s too confusing. We’ve abstracted all that complexity into a single Web site, where you can add your favorite show and don’t have to worry about where they are from…That’s great the market is going that way. We have no ability to control the market, we just build tools to help people manage it.”