Now that the Web is starting to rival television as a medium for video entertainment, two companies have built interactive program guides to help you find the stuff you really want to watch.
Here at DEMO in San Diego, Invision.tv showed its version of a program guide. (Be warned, Invision seems to be having a hard time dealing with the surge of Demo traffic.) It organizes video by channels, like CNN and Funny or Die, then gives you thumbnails of each individual video. You can watch a video you select in a small window in the upper left corner of the Invision site or you can choose to play it full screen or at the site where the video originates.
You can tell Invision what you're interested in and it'll deliver suggestions. You also have access to social networking tools that let you vote or comment on a video, mark it as a favorite or share it with a friend.
Ffwd.com requires a little more setup than Invision. To make it work, you need to sign up and tell the site about your interests. Than Ffwd shows you channels with videos about your interests, which can be as specific as The Addams Family television show or as broad as fitness. The site builds channels based on those interests, drawing video from numerous sources. The videos are filtered by their popularity with other Web viewers.
Ffwd identifies subjects in the video you're watching. You can click on an icon, see the subjects involved and find more videos on that subject. The site also lets you filter types of videos. If you only want to see full episodes of The Office and not short clips, you can choose that specification for that channel.
If you're looking for a way to cut through the clutter of endless skateboarding and dad-getting-hit-in-the-crotch videos, these services both look like good ways of finding stuff you're really interested in.
