Download Squad

While YouTube is still the big name in online video, there are hundreds or even thousands of web sites displaying videos online. Two companies launching at DEMO this week are offering two different approaches to the problem of finding videos you might like even though they're scattered across the web.

Invision.tv is sort of like an electronic program guide for web video. When you visit the site you can either scan through a list of popular programs from popular web sites like YouTube, Comedy Central, Hulu, or CNN. Or you can enter a search term and scan through the videos that come up. You can watch videos in the player, rate videos or share them with other users.

While Invision.tv is somewhat useful as a search engine, it's a bit annoying to use as a video player. The video display window is tiny compared to the program guide window. And while you can watch some videos in fullscreen, some web services don't let you watch embedded videos in fullscreen mode. So while you can blow up low quality YouTube videos, high quality Hulu streams have to be watched in a tiny window. You're probably better off just watching the video on Hulu's web site.

If Invision.tv is like a program guide, ffwd is more like the remote control. The site lets you pick TV shows, web video channels, and topics you're interested in and then provides you with a steady stream of videos that should meet your interests. The algorithm seems like it could use a little work though. When I said I liked The Daily Show, I was presented with a rather dull clip about the economy from Bloomberg. When I said i liked Futurama, I saw a clip of a cute girl singing a really annoying song. I guess because both are supposed to be funny?

While there's certainly a need for a good way to sift through the millions of videos online, neither of these sites quite fit the bill. They're hardly the first two companies to launch online video search engines though. Blinkx, OVGuide, Truveo, and others have been at it for a while. How do you make sense of the madness? Let us know in the comments.

[via ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat]