Movieclips picks up $3 million Series A round

Video site offers over 12,000 clips and short scenes from some of the most famous movies

Movieclips.com, a video site for scenes and clips from films, announced Tuesday that it has raised a $3 million Series A round from Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from a long list of angel investors: Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Kearl, Tom McInerney, and prior investor Richmond Park Partners.

Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures and Adam Lilling of First Round Capital will be joining MovieClips’ board of directors.

The idea behind Movieclips is that people want an easy way to find and watch certain short clips from their favorite movies without having to play the whole movie and search for it themselves (the huge number of movie clips on YouTube is testament to this). On Movieclips, users can search for clips by actor, movie, director and even dialogue. Or they can browse through a series of different categories.

Even more creative than just single clips are the site’s Top 10 and Mashup videos, which are curated video compilations like Top 10 Sword Fights, a countdown of the coolest sword fights, or Alien Attacks, a mashup of, well, alien attacks.

“The Internet is the ideal medium to showcase short-form movie clips. Consumers can never get enough of their favorite movies, premium advertisers want to connect with this audience, and movie studios need trusted partners to showcase the best of their libraries,” said Tod Francis, Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. “Movieclips is the destination where this all comes together.”

While YouTube is popularly used to find scenes from movies, the problem is that user-uploaded clips are often of poor video quality. And there's no telling which clips will be available. On top of everything, it’s unlikely that a user waited to receive permission to share the clip from its publisher, so a lot of clips on YouTube are actually just waiting to get pulled down.

MovieClips, on the other hand, offers 12,000 movie clips from the libraries of six major Hollywood studios: 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Partnered with such major film producers, the site is destined provide one of the most comprehensive databases of high-quality movie clips.

That said, MovieClips has a ways to go, even though it has already come a long way since beta launching last December. It’s missing my personal three favorite movies (8 1/2, Fight Club and 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a lot of other classics, like Star Wars. For user adoption to speed up, the site will need to keep adding the most essential films.