Movieclips gets $7M and partners with YouTube

Faith Merino · August 9, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1d9e

The company is backed by MK Capital

Big news for Movieclips, the Pandora for short-form movie clips: on Tuesday, the company announced its brand spankin’ new partnership with YouTube, along with a nice $7 million Series B round led by MK Capital, with help from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, Richmond Park Partners, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Kearl, and Tom McInerney.  Allen DeBevoise, CEO of Machinima, and Gordon Rubenstein also participated in the round.

Movieclips will be sharing its 20,000+ licensed HD movie clips with YouTube, where they’ll be featured on YouTube’s Movie Extras page, as well as Movieclips’ YouTube channel. For the first time, YouTube fans can get access to high-quality HD movie clips never before seen on YouTube, and each clip will recommend related clips after the video finishes.  Additionally, YouTubers can visit the Movieclips channel to see clip mashups, play movie games, get trivia, trailers, and check out movie-related shows.

Movieclips’ curation process is pretty interesting in itself.  Film studios usually restrict the clips to no more than two minutes and 13 seconds, and many clips come with additional restrictions: MovieClips can’t show any corporate logos, there are music restrictions, certain actors can’t be shown without their shirts on, etc.

Similar to Pandora’s music genome analysis, each individual clip on Movieclips is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data, including actor, director, dialogue, and more, allowing users to search for clips by movie title, actor, director, types of characters, scenes, specific lines of dialogue, and even props.

“Based on our relevant experience in Machinima, we find Movieclips’ business to be extremely promising,” said Mark Terbeek, a partner at MK Capital. “We believe Movieclips has the chance to dominate the movie category on YouTube like Machinima leads the gaming category and VEVO leads the music video category.”

MK Capital has also invested in Machinima, one of the leading publishers on YouTube.  In addition to the funding, Mark Terbeek of MK Capital will join Sean Flynn of Shasta Ventures and Adam Lilling of Launchpad LA on the Movieclips Board of Directors. MK Capital’s Yair Landau, who served as Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, will become a Board Observer.

We previously covered Movieclips’ funding round when the company filed an SEC form in June for $6 million of its $7 million round.  At the time, I noted that the company’s movie inventory was not to my liking as it was missing clips from 1960s Jane Fonda cult classic “Barbarella,” about a voluptuous space-traveler who cruises through the galaxy, sleeping with strange men and getting her clothes torn off.  I requested the movie, but have yet to see clips on the site.

 

Image source: Youtube.com

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