The video search gold rush

Thus it’s not surprising that TV Guide thinks that they have a shot at being the TV Guide of the Internet. In April they will release their version of video search, with several clear distinctions from the existing competitors. The majority of searchers are still looking for professional entertainment videos, according to their research. So for starters, TV Guide will only search professionally-produced entertainment and news content, initially on about fifty different sites.  Moreover, they will augment their automatic search functions with a staff of human editors who will organize content and make recommendations (although site will also offer a “most-viewed” function as well).

In its beta version, the result is a clean interface that offers very easy searching of most popular Internet videos, with ways to easily select short clips versus full episodes, or paid versus free content. Do the “American Idol” search mentioned above and your results are all actually American Idol video content in various shapes and sizes, linked from the original sources. The presentation is more ordered and easily scanned than existing search engines.

More importantly, TV Guide’s search engine also supports browsing when you don’t have an exact search term in mind: you can choose specific genres — drama, comedy, adventure, sci-fi, pets, fashion, travel and about fifteen others — and see choices in a grid-like presentation.  What you don’t get, of course, are the Diet-Coke-and-mentos viral videos, although the TV Guide developers say they will continue to add new kinds of video content in the future. That will be crucial: as more and better “straight-to-Web” video appears, TV Guide will need to rapidly widen its search choices.

So will TV Guide become the TV Guide of the Internet?  It’s far too soon to say. But when you look ahead, the Internet and conventional television will increasingly merge in the living room.  Television delivered via Internet protocol (IPTV) will look more like the Internet; the Internet, streamed directly to the big screen, will look more like conventional television. In another few years, some families may not always be sure whether what they’re watching on the big screen is the Internet or television. It may prove then that TV Guide’s current strong relationships with the networks and cable channels will merge nicely with an ability to also organize the Web.

But that’s far off. What’s most interesting for now is that the TV Guide search model challenges one of the fundamental truisms about the Internet — that the “long tail,” composed of a million pieces of specialized and often user-generated content, is where the real value is. The TV Guide approach says that regardless of the means of distribution, a whole lot of people will continue to be interested in the same content, and that much of that will still be professionally-made. 

That mirrors a current debate across all media, from journalism to pop music, about the relative value of big versus small, professional versus amateur content, and editorial control versus user-generated choices. Like most debates about the future of the Internet, neither side is likely to be altogether right. The Internet is really a meta-medium, capable of functioning in various ways, and it will probably prove to support both mass-market content and the tiny independent. If the TV Guide search engine takes off, it will suggest that sometimes by narrowing choices you can actually create more value for the consumer.

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