In a recent PFF paper I argued that “We Are Living in the Golden Age of Children’s Programming,” and showed how, despite incessant complaints by many policymakers:

the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at their disposal on broadcast TV. Today, by contrast, there exists a broad and growing diversity of children’s television options from which families can choose.

I then documented there and in my book, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection:

• the many excellent family- or child-oriented networks available on cable, telco, and satellite television today;
• the growing universe of religious / spiritual television networks;
• the many family or educational programs that traditional TV broadcasters offer; or
• the massive market for interactive computer software or Internet websites for children.

And every time I turn around I find another great show, service, or site for families to choose from.  Earlier today I highlighted the excellent new online video search service, Clicker.com, which is essentially a “TV Guide for the Internet.”  It is absolutely awesome and I highly recommend you play with it. You’ll be instantly hooked if you are TV junkie.

Better yet, Clicker.com offers a wonderful compendium of kid- and family-oriented video programming options. Although the site is still fairly new, you can already find 660 shows and almost 5,000 unique episodes of kids programming there.  A lot of it is just good ‘ol fashion couch potato fare ranging from the old (The Jetsons, Fat Albert, The Flintstones, etc) to the new stuff that you’d find on various cable channels today.  But there’s also plenty of wonderful educational programming to be found on Clicker including shows like Arthur, Sesame Street (over 1,000 episodes), Martha Speaks, The Electric Company, Animal Exploration with Jarod Miller, Jonathan Bird’s Blue World, Postcards From Buster, Science on Brain Pop, Technology on Brain Pop, and more.

Although my kids aren’t really into TV, as they grow older, I bet they’ll be watching a lot more programming via services like Clicker.  Currently, my kids enjoy watching snippets of video via kid-oriented online search portals like KidZui and Glubble.  Such online walled gardens offer a safe place for parents to find terrific online content for their kids.   Bottom line: compared to the miserable state of affairs some of us faced growing up in the 1970s, kids and parents have never had it better in terms of the video programming options at their disposal.

Anyway, some of “kid-vid” issues — including potential expansion of the Children’s Television Act of 1990 — could be up for discussion in the FCC’s new proceeding, “Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape” (MB Docket 09-194).  The FCC just tweeted about it here and I posted my thoughts on where the agency might be heading in this proceeding in this post last month.

Around this time last year, a relative 20 years my senior was asking me what I was writing about and I mentioned how I’d been collecting anecdotes and stats for what was becoming our “Cutting the Video Cord” series here.  That series has documented how the Internet and new digital media options are displacing traditional video distribution channels.  We’ve been exploring what that means for consumers, regulators and the media itself.

I asked this relative of mine if they spent any time watching their favorite shows, or even movies, online or through alternative means than just their cable or satellite subscription.  He said he didn’t because of the lack of an easy way to find all their favorite shows quickly.  Specifically, he lamented the lack of a good “TV Guide” for online video. I explained to him that, for most of us 40 and under, our “TV Guide” was called “a search engine”!  It’s pretty easy to just pop in any show name or topic into your preferred search engine and then click on “Video” to see what you get back.  Nonetheless, I had to concede that random searching for video wouldn’t necessarily be the way everyone would want to go about it.  And it wouldn’t necessarily organize the results in way viewers would find useful–grouping things thematically by genre or offering the sort of related programming you might be interested in seeing.

Well, good news, such a service now exists. Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal brought “Clicker.com” to my attention in her column last night, a terrific new (and free) video search service:

… Clicker [is] a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I played around with Clicker quite a bit last night and this morning and can safely say that I will be spending a lot of my free time there in coming months and years, as will a lot of other folks I suspect. It’s a great way to search a broad array of websites for the very best video content on the Net.  I’m a car nut and used Clicker to quickly pull up some of my favorite programs as well as several I had never heard of before.  The player will allow you to fire up many of those videos right away, or at least direct you to the site where the content is housed to watch it there immediately.  The playlist feature allows you to create a customized “TV Guide” for you and your own family.  Very cool.

Anyway, when we add Clicker to all the other great online video services out there today, it’s even harder for me to understand the amount of time Washington regulators and lawmakers spend obsessing about crusty old TV regulatory issues.  It just doesn’t make any sense.