We are thrilled to announce that Clicker is now open to everyone. Our beta period is officially over. We’d like to thank everyone who tweeted about us, sent us feedback, and tested the site during the past 58 days of beta. A major part of our final product has come from your input.

Some of you, especially those who were jacked up to get invites to the beta the past couple of days and wanted time to taunt your friends, may be saying, “Hey, what’s the hurry?  Doesn’t beta usually last like 6 months or a year or something?”  Usually, yes.  You can thank our engineering team’s ability to crank for our failure to dawdle.  In addition, one thing that continually surprised us during beta was how much of your feedback was plain old enthusiastic support.  While we know we have months and years of innovation ahead to fulfill our vision for what Clicker can be, this feedback let us know it was time to take off the training wheels.

Now, what’s a public launch without some awesome new features? We’ve got a lot of those, including:

* 33% more content than beta! We now have over 400,000 full episodes of programming from more than 7,000 shows.

* Netflix and Amazon VOD Movies: Clicker now includes Instant Streaming movies and Amazon VOD for-purchase movies. To view Netflix movies, you must have a Netflix account. Amazon VOD movies are available for either purchase, or rent.  (TV coming in the next couple of weeks.  Gotta fit it all into our data format so it’s actually useful before we let it go live!)

* Facebook Connect: You can now connect to Clicker using your Facebook account. This allows you to share content with your Facebook friends, maintain a Playlist, and edit our wiki.

* Revamped Playlist UI, nomenclature, and functionality: Save episodes, music videos, or movies into your playlist. Or subscribe to a show, so when a new episode becomes available it will be added to your Playlist automatically.

* Search Within: Want to find the 60 Minutes interview with President Obama? Just search purely within the 60 Minutes catalog.  Want to find episodes of Charlie Rose where he interviews Warren Buffett?  Do the same!

* Related Search: During beta, we dramatically improved our algorithms for making suggestions related to the shows you’re watching.  It’s a good thing our Playlist has been improved so much because you’re going to be adding a ton of programs you just discovered.

* Editing: We were getting so many people recommending edits to our pages, so we made a number of improvements to make it easier for you to submit changes.

Those are just some highlights.  There have been a lot of improvements, big and small.  The bottom line is that we’re ready to open up and see what the world thinks of Clicker.

And so, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, we are about to take our first step into a larger world.

The Force will be with you, beta users…always.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Verticals, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.