Clicker has become part of the CBS family, with the latter acquiring the former. As part of the deal, Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone has become President of CBS Interactive.
Clicker
Clicker came out of beta around 18 months ago and offered a new way of finding online video programming. At its heart a search engine built and maintained specially for online video, Clicker allows users to find and view content that is available to watch online. At least from legitimate sources such as Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes.
At the time we profiled the site a year ago, Clicker searched 1,200 sources to find 600,000 episodes from 10,000 shows, but I’m sure all those numbers have gone up since then.
Clicker managed to raise $19 million in funding and built traffic levels up to around 3 million uniques every month. And now it has been bought by U.S. television giant CBS.
CBS Acquires Clicker, Takes Lanzone
CBS has acquired Clicker, adding it to the impressive range of online properties CBS now owns. The man who sold Clicker, CEO Jim Lanzone, has been given a executive role at CBS, so this looks like it was as much a talent grab as anything else.
Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of CBS Corporation, said:
“In just over a year, Jim has created one of the leading navigation and discovery tools for video programming on the Internet. Clicker’s products and proprietary technologies add firepower to our existing portfolio of entertainment properties, and if we can help grow Clicker to its full potential in the years ahead, the strategic value could be tremendous.”
It’s clear from that that CBS hasn’t bought Clicker just to kill it, and instead plans to nurture it. My guess is that Clicker and TV.com will be combined at some stage, especially as the latter has the domain name to die for in this sector.
The price CBS paid for Clicker hasn’t been revealed but is expected to have been somewhere in the region of $50 million to $100 million. Which is really nothing more than loose change for the television network. So it has to be considered a good deal.
[Via TechCrunch]
