ET Phone Home: Find Your Favorite Movie Moments With AnyClip [Interview]

Universal has recently announced a new partnership with AnyClip, a company that chops up and tags films to make them searchable from the dialogue to the actors, behavior, objects and more. Under the deal, which is the largest in AnyClip's history, Universal is licensing a large portion of its library to AnyClip, who will be tagging scenes for a variety of full feature films including classics like 'ET' and 'Jaws' and more recent films like Academy Award Nominee 'The Kids Are Alright', making it easy for viewers to search for any moment in a particular movie and share that moment with their friends. I had the opportunity to ask AnyClip CEO Oren Nauman a few questions about the deal with Universal, as well as AnyClip itself. Find out what he had to say below. Before getting to the Universal deal, I asked CEO Oren Nauman for some background on AnyClip. He told me that the idea was conceived by JVP's Erel Margalit, and former Sony exec Mickey Schulhoff. The idea was that, "instead of licensing short clips [they] would approach the studios with whole films and build a platform that can support any third party distributor that can utilize movie clips." The team developed a special tagging system that, according to Nauman, "identifies everything in a movie with an elaborate search algorithm and proprietary tagging platform that allows users to search for anything in a film - quotes, actors, genres, objects, colors, brands, text, movie and cultural references, etc." Sounds pretty neat, right? The business model captures the audience of studios looking to monetize and revitalize their films. They've also got an open API for developers and, of course, capture the interest of consumers with their free, legal premium content. I decided to try it out for myself. I searched for "ET Phone Home" at AnyClip.com and the search resulted in the following clip, the scene from ET where he says, "ET Phone Home". Embedding is "coming soon", but you can click here or on the image below to watch the clip. Oh, and how adorable is little Drew Barrymore? So what does the Universal deal entail? Nauman told me, "Under the deal, AnyClip will be tagging around 5K unique individual elements for a broad range of Universal full feature films. Let me stress, we are the only company that currently has access to full feature films. The goal here is to reinvigorate customer interest in their films by allowing anyone to search for any moment and share that moment with everyone - AnyClip will also provide a link to buy or rent the film." Clips can currently be shared via Facebook, Twitter, email and short URL. As stated above, Embedding is coming soon. Nauman also told me that, "Content from Universal and other future studio deals will be made available to AnyClip's network of distribution partners. Anywhere you see promotional video online for film and television, we want to be that video player - entertainment blogs, VOD sites and news database websites. We're expanding what websites can do with licensed video content by going far beyond the traditional promotional clips and trailers." Developers should be excited as well. Nauman tells me, "We are also offering an open API to developers where they can access our catalog of licensed video content so they can use it in exciting and innovative ways to showcase premium content. Metadata is very powerful and we know developers are going to love it!" I'm excited to see the sorts of things developers will come up with, using AnyClip's API. Additionally, as you can see on AnyClip's Facebook page, AnyClip is honored to be tagging all of the winning films from SXSW and adding them to their library in addition to the Universal content and other independent film content. Personally, I think that AnyClip's service, and their partnership with Universal, is exciting and even monumental. Can you imagine a hopefully not-so-distant future when AnyClip partners with more studios and distributors and you can search for and find virtually any clip from any movie and share it online? How awesome would that be? Try to find your favorite movie clips on AnyClip and see what turns up and, of course, let us know what you think in the comments!

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ET Phone Home: Find Your Favorite Movie Moments With AnyClip [Interview]

Universal has recently announced a new partnership with AnyClip, a company that chops up and tags films to make them searchable from the dialogue to the actors, behavior, objects and more

Megan O'Neill

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Megan O'Neill