If you’re a student trying to make ends meet, you’re probably looking for any way you can find to cut expenses and stretch those college dollars. One of the best ways to do that is to take a cold, hard look at your cable bill.
Cable TV used to be a pretty good deal, twenty years ago. For just around 30 bucks a month you could get all the crap you wanted delivered right there in your living room in living color. But then came the information superhighway, bundled long-distance digital telephone. Pretty soon those great deals turned into $150 to $200 per month burdens.
Fortunately, there’s a solution. With the Internet revolution, we now have convenient websites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com, and most of the stations you watch are putting their programs online. But who wants to spend valuable television-watching time surfing the web for cool shows? Kind of defeats the purpose, don’t you think?
Apparently someone else thought so to and thus Clicker.com was born. It’s a relatively new addition to the Netflix-Hulu-iTunes lineup of online media sites, but it’s by far the most useful. Clicker doesn’t actually host any media – instead, it functions as a Google-like media search engine. You search for a show you’re interested in, and it tells you where to find it. Then, it provides links to the sites where the media is actually located, and you can take it from there.
Better still, it comes up with a list of other shows and movies you might be interested in that are related to the one you were just checking out. So if, for example, you’re in the mood to watch “The Dresden Files,” you visit Clicker, do a quick search and the search engine will tell you there are 12 episodes online for both free and paid viewing, and you can watch them at Netflix and Hulu. It also gives you a list of other shows like “The Dresden Files” such as “Blood Ties,” “Monk,” “Medium,” and “Farscape.”
Pretty nifty. Also it’s completely free. You can set up an account using your Facebook login, if you’re into sharing your viewing habits online. It’s also possible to make your account and search information completely private, if oversharing isn’t not your thing.
Clicker also has a mobile app, currently available only for the Droid, but there’s an iPhone version due out soon. Both will be available for free from the Droid store and iTunes.
If you’re a student struggling to make ends meet, and if, you’ve decided that one way to do it is by “cutting the cable,” then I would highly recommend bookmarking Clicker. It won’t cost you a dime, and it’s an easy way to enhance and expand your entertainment options.