Can I just say that after giving up TV, I have had a bitch of a time trying to find Family Guy and Sex and the City episodes (which I have recently gotten re-addicted to over the Christmas holiday) online. I found a solution (and something else to get addicted to) – OVGuide.com. OVG is now on my Firefox toolbar – and that's a big deal to me, though maybe not you because you don't know how important something has to be to me to land a spot on that toolbar.

A TV Guide for online video. It's about time someone came up with this concept. OVGuide does the job of finding, collecting and organizing the never ending multitude of video sites (not the videos themselves) in the net space. It's the best site you've never heard of.

I sat down with the men who know the site best: it's Creator and President/Head of Technology, Dale Bock, who started OVGuide as a side project and Chad Cooper, Manager of Marketing and Editorial Content, to find out the flesh and bones of the site. And by that I mean all the fun stuff, not the technology info that I haven't a clue about.

So tell me about the search engine component of the site.
Chad Cooper: We are basically only indexing the sites that we have vetted as being the best sites for online video. We use Google but a highly customized version of it and we tell it to look at only the sites that we have, and we have already gotten rid of almost all of the sites that are probably not going to be relevant.

So the sites are narrowed down by Google, do you then go to each individual site and make sure everything is kosher, up and running?
Dale Bock: Yes, that's what our editors do. We have an editorial team that runs quality assurance, everyday, checking links.

Do you ask for feedback, as far as finding what works and what doesn't from users?
DB: Yeah, that's apart of our whole commenting system. We have a very interactive community.
CC: They're actually our best QA because they let us know when sites are down, when Revver's down for maintenance. We're building a little community with comments on OVGuide.
DB: On any given day there are just dozens of comments. If a site is not up to par, we quickly know about it.

CC: We have no problem suspending sites or removing them, if they're down or the content isn't being updated. We only care about the content and the users, which is why the top ten sites on the page aren't the Youtubes of the world.
DB: No one has paid us for placement, even though there are rumors that we take payment for placement.

I think this may become the college student's best friend.
CC: Yeah, college kids are a big part of it but working people are a big part of it too because they spend a lot of their work days on it.

I found this amusing and so, as most humans do, I laughed.

DB: A lot of people will watch during their lunch break if they can't go out.

I don't believe him, I think people are on the clock and catching up with Heroes and Weeds while pretending to “file your taxes”.

CC: People are also discovering so many new things on the site because we have so many niche categories. We aren't just showing them Youtube, we're showing them content from a thousand plus other sites. You can only see a beaver kicking a horse in the face so many times. But there are so many different types of outlets out there.

DB: Sometimes there is just a need for, ya know, 'how do I get to CBS's videos' because you have to sift through the site to find them, and OVGuide will take you directly to that page.

CC: We also have this new thing we're doing with the top searches, called OVBuzz (you can through OVGuide or directly through OVBuzz.com).
DB: It's just what people are looking for at the moment, the larger the letters, the more the show or movie has been searched. It's extremely active, about 5 or 6 searches per second.

CC: What's also great is that it's not just movies and TV, it's the best online games, anime, Asian drama, home video, music entertainment, independent films and shorts, educational programming, Pay Per View, sports, travel, wine and cooking.

Here is where I want to ask about porn, but I refrain.

DB: There are other sites in the space that do only movies or TV, like DailyReel, but we are just all-encompassing of any category.
CC: At the end of the day, we are just finding the best sites for online video because our main focus is the viewer, the user. Period. That's what everything spirals around. We keep over 70% of every user that comes to the site.

DB: And that hasn't changed from day 1 of the site, out of every 100 people that randomly come to the site, 70 of them continue to use us consistently.

Are there plans to make the search findings customized for each user?
CC: We're probably going to develop apps were users can bookmark their favorite videos and their favorite video sites, so they don't have to do that on Youtube and then MetaCafe and then do it on another site, that there is one nice place for it. That's what we're going to be doing, that's what we do do and we are going to be building out our MyOVGuide application much more.

That's our next step now that we have the hundreds of thousands of people a day, we want to get them to interact to the next level.

Is OVG planning to go international?
DB: Yes, we are rolling out Spanish and Mandarin Chinese guides. We aren't going to just translate English content, we are going to organize and display content in these languages so that it is a guide specifically for that demographic.

I know that you are editorial only and not commenting on morality and what not, as far as picking sites and attaching them to OVGuide. Other than the obvious are there just some sites that OVG won't touch?
CC: Well, oddly enough, bestiality is a popular search but that it just one genre we won't go near.

Photo by Cdubya