BlinkBox: User Generated Ads For Movies, TV (and it's fun)

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

A new UK startup launches on Monday called BlinkBox. Users take pre-created clips from movies and television shows (the clips can be shortened by the user) and add a personalized message at the beginning. The clips can then be shared via a link, embed or mobile device. Here’s an example of (a very funny) one that was created for me.

There’s a pretty deep catalog of movies and TV shows to view. The company’s business model is to pitch buying or renting the movie or tv show after viewing the clip. They’ve built their own (heavily DRM’d) platform for delivering this content to buyers, although it only works on Windows machines at this time.

The concept is similar to Slingbox’s Clip+Sling, which allows Slingbox users to create short content clips and share it with friends.

The site is not working 100% for me – embeds don’t work and most of the clips can’t be selected when creating a blink. This may be pre-launch jitters, or licensing issues restricting me because I’m U.S. based (it’s launching only in the UK for now).

We have more on this at TechCrunch UK.

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