ReadWriteWeb

I just watched a few minutes of Zach Galifianakis mock-interviewing Tila Tequila and Jennifer Anniston on a faux TV interview show online. Now I'm that many minutes closer to my inevitable death.

Clicker.com, the website that brought me this experience, worthless but for the 15 second pre-roll commercial now buried somewhere in the part of my brain that might buy things, has been acquired by CBS this morning and its leader will now run the Interactive division (the future) of one of the biggest media companies in the world.

Television is one of the biggest markets in entertainment, but it is at the early stages of a huge shift online. While most people still watch TV through cable and via traditional linear programming, increasingly TV will be delivered over the Internet and with the user in charge of their own programming. The big TV networks are already making moves to prepare for this shift, of course, with efforts like Hulu.

Just as interesting to watch is how new startups will design for the changing usage patterns of TV consumers. Clicker is one such company. Co-founded by ex-Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone, Clicker aims to be the TV Guide of Internet TV. I spoke with Lanzone to find out how the idea came about and to hear his thoughts on how Internet TV is evolving.

In May, Google announced a new Internet TV product called Google TV. As we noted at the time, the most interesting aspect of the announcement was the developer ecosystem that Google is introducing to television. Google TV will not just allow you to view television programs and online video content, it'll also give you access to Internet TV applications built using Google's mobile operating system Android.

Google is positioning itself as an Internet TV platform, despite not offering a hardware component like Apple TV and Microsoft Mediaroom. Instead, Google has partnered with electronics giant Sony on the hardware side. Google TV launches in the fall inside a new line of Sony TVs, so let's look at what we can expect to see.

Clicker, the company that wants to become the TV Guide for the Internet, just launched its first iPhone app. The new app is a companion piece to Clicker's web service and aims to make it easier for users to quickly find iPhone-compatible videos on the Web. In addition to indexing these iPhone-friendly videos, Clicker's iPhone app also offers a number of social networking features, including the ability to  check in when you are watching a show.

Clicker, the Web service that aims to be the TV Guide for Internet television, just launched Clicker.tv at Google I/O. Clicker.tv is a new HTML5-based interface for Clicker's programming guide that is optimized for the "10-foot viewing experience" on a big screen in the living room. Google chose to highlight Clicker during today's I/O keynote because of its innovative use of HTML5 to create an easy-to-use interface that gives its users access to a large catalog of online video.

Students at UCLA don't have to rely on torrent sites to get their fix of online TV anymore - or at least that's the message the school wants to send. UCLA just announced a partnership with Clicker, a programming guide for online TV content. Thanks to this partnership, students at UCLA will soon be able to use a co-branded version of Clicker that will give them convenient access to student-generated content, university-generated content and regular online TV content and music videos from services like Hulu.

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

In a world where content is king, Boxee has found a way to give entertainment producers the royal treatment. After a successful App challenge and calculated rollouts of its Mac, Windows and Linux releases, internet television platform Boxee is launching into private beta with a new and improved look. ReadWriteWeb got an early look at the product and found out how the company plans to increase its growing user base.

Clicker, which aims to be the TV Guide for Internet television, just launched. We first reviewed Clicker last week when it was still in private beta. The version that went live today features a number of significant improvements to the private beta version. Clicker now indexes 33% more shows than before and indexes over 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows. Clicker also now features an improved DVR-like playlist, integration with Facebook Connect and improved search. In addition, Clicker users can now also comment on shows and use a wiki-like feature to contribute information about a given show or episode.

Finding specific online videos from TV networks and independent producers can often be a daunting challenge. Some TV shows are on Hulu, some can only be found as paid downloads on iTunes or Amazon and some are only available for streaming on the network's and producer's own sites.

Clicker wants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.