TC50 - AnyClip seeks to change the way we watch videos online
With so many ways to interact online now, companies are finding new and improved ways to help us find and consume media on the Web. How about movies for example? Imagine if you could make a search and watch exactly the clip from a movie you are looking for?
AnyClip, presented its product today at the TC50 conference in San Francisco. Its sole mission: to let you find any moment from any film ever made. The site has no intention of actually having movies live on it's own servers. Instead, all its information comes in dynamically from across the Web. "It's about search and results," said CEO and co-founder Nate Westheimer, explaining how AnyClip aggregates publicly available data, like videos from YouTube or other streaming sites.
The demo of the product showed how, in order for AnyClip to reach its full potential, users need to participate by logging in and out time code from the movies they seek to add to the database. The user then tags those pieces of time code to make the video search-able. AnyClip said usually around 500 tags live on a film.
AnyClip has also released a public API in hopes to have other companies make use of its platform. It said it believes app developers like, RockYou and Zynga, could release some great applications revolving around those movie clips and the meta data that lives within them.
One of the obstacles that AnyClip could potentially encounter, brought up by Sean Parker, Managing Partner at The Founders Fund, is getting content owners (like movie studios) on board for such a massive and financially complicated task. AnyClip said it would do whatever it takes to get them to join the process, and it has already started by keeping all of its movie clips under four minutes.