Movieclips wants to be the HBO of YouTube. Today the company is announcing that it is bringing a network of searchable and interactive scenes from movies of the major studios to YouTube that allows viewers to watch clips from movies, play games and search for scenes by any type of search query imaginable.
Movieclips has been spending two years going through movies from six of the seven major studios (except Disney) adding metadata to clips and scenes to make a searchable network of movie scenes. Users can search props, locations, actors and more. “We see YouTube as the new cable,” said co-founder Zach James. “We want to be its movie network.”
Movieclips borrows ideas from a lot of different places. Ever play “SceneIt” through on-demand cable? Movieclips has an interactive game almost exactly like it that is clickable on the viewing window. Ever use Vevo to search and watch music videos? Movieclips has the same type of agreement with the movie studios that Vevo has with the music labels.
It is an interesting endeavor. Movieclips has one of the largest licensed library of movie clips on the Internet and uses a team of “content” curators to add metatags to searchable data to the library. Imagine if your job was to watch movie scenes and tag everything you see in the clip, from an apple to Brad Pitt. Sounds like it could be fun, if extremely tedious.
“There’s a sea of content that can add to a YouTube user’s movie experience thanks to Movieclips.com,” said Camille Hearst, YouTube’s product marketing manager for music, movies, and shows, in a press release. “We’re excited to be working with Movieclips.com to provide users with exactly what they’re looking for when they want to get more into movies on YouTube.”
Movieclips has been able to amass its searchable library through several rounds of venture funding, with the most recent a Series B round led by MK Capital.
The general goal is to promote movie discovery that can lead to digital movie rentals. This could be done on YouTube through its recent premium movie rental product or through Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, AT&T U-Verse, Microsoft digital rentals (through Zune or Xbox) etc. In that way, Movieclips is also trying to become the Pandora of movie clips (even calling part of the project the “movie genome project”).
In the spirit of the venture, here is a YouTube video that helps explain the movie genome concept and how to search and interact with scenes through Movieclips.
