And in our can’t-imagine-even-needing-this-five-years-ago department, we have Clicker.com, available at http://www.clicker.com/. This site describes itself as the “first complete programming guide to Internet television,” and contains information on over 400,000 episodes over 1200 sources in over 1200 categories. (And that doesn’t even count the 30,000 movies available on demand from Netflix and Amazon, or the 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.)

The front page of the site lets you look for content in a variety of ways: you can browse by show title or by category, or look for Web originals, TV, movies, or music. I decided to look for comedies and got a screen that looked like this:

Not only are there new and popular comedies, but you can filter your result to find only those comedies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. You can also filter just for movies or for original Web programming. I took a look at the comedies available for the 70s and was presented with a list of shows that included Saturday Night Live, WKRP, Electric Company, Sanford and Son, and Rhoda. I was confused to note that some of the shows listed included the number of episodes available as 0. Why list them, then?

I took a look at Barney Miller, which has 70 episodes available online and its own page, which looks like this:

The show’s page lists the episodes with air dates, titles, and brief descriptions of the plot. The screnshot will take you to view the episode — in this case on Hulu. Show information has a space for external links and additional information, but none of the shows I looked at had additional information added.

Since I watched way too much TV in the 70s I went and took a look at the Web originals instead. Here I found content in a huge number of categories, including news, art, drama, documentary, business & finance, etc. Like the TV episodes, these series had episode listings, descriptions, room for editing, etc.

While this site was packed with listings, and actually reminded me of some TV shows I’d forgotten about, I couldn’t imagine using it as I watch TV. I need an easy way to connect my computer to my television to make the most of Clicker.com. I don’t think we’re quite there yet — or did we get there and I missed it?