Who Will Be the TV Guide of the Internet Video Realm?

In my most recent Boston Globe column, I look at the competition to provide a useful guide to the world of Internet video. From the piece:

Several start-up companies, such as ClipBlast, Channels.com, Blinkx, and MeeVee Inc., are trying to develop a TV Guide for Internet video. And they're competing with none other than TVGuide.com, part of Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., which plans to launch its own guide to online video next month.

The amount of videos pouring onto the Web isn't the only challenge they face. Some content isn't described well, or accurately.
"You might have a couple of guys fooling around in front of a camera who want their video to get watched a lot, and they use the term 'Britney Spears' to describe it, so it shows up in lots of searches," says Neil Kjeldsen, vice president of marketing and content at MeeVee in Burlingame, Calif.

And then there's the problem of transience: an Internet video that appears one day may vanish the next, either because it was posted without the permission of the copyright holder, or simply because it's no longer newsworthy. "We have to battle with that all the time," says Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of the San Francisco video search company Blinkx.

And the LA Times has this short piece looking at TV Guide's efforts specifically.