TC50: AnyClip searches movies for quotes, famous moments
AnyClip, a startup that launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, is a service that purports to let you find any moment from any film every made.
It’s a tall order. AnyClip says it searches through all the publicly available video on the web. It doesn’t use speech-to-text technology. Instead it relies on movie buffs to tag and sort their favorite moments through the ClipIt platform – the Mechanical Turk approach to product development. Users can create metadata that AnyClip uses to sort through video.
Videos in AnyClips’ database have on average about 500 tags, the company said. Like most startups, AnyClip also wants to become a platform, by releasing a public application programming interface today. AnyClip plans to make money through advertising deals that will run on AnyClip, and by routing users to buy DVDs and taking a cut of the sale.
Judges at the conference provided some feedback to the company.
Sean Parker, Founders Fund: Content deals are very hard. I want to know where you are with the studios. It’s a clean product if you can get the content deals. It’s going to be hard to get them to pay attention to this. They’re still experimenting with streaming. They haven’t even figured out their basic model yet. Fear is one of the biggest factors preventing content owners from experimenting with new technology. It’s good idea — it will let studios monetize the back-end of their studio. What you need is tenacity. However long you think it will take you to get the deals, it will take twice as long.
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn: One of the things you’ll be competing with is tags on YouTube clips. Another will be search engine optimization. I would highly elaborate on discovery functions. People will only type in a search, but they’ll click on new things. It’s a very coherent product. The other challenge on monetization is that the more money you make, your contracts will be renegotiated so content providers will take as much money away as possible.
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook: I would think hard about the incentive structure so it’s obvious about why people would do this. I would maybe add a leaderboard or contests. I would also worry about the spam problem.
AnyClip Trailer – Great Moments From Epic Films from Team AnyClip on Vimeo.
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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