Online movie clips site Movieclips.com has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital as well as a number of angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi, Jeff Kearl, Tom McInerney, and prior investor Richmond Park Partners.
Launched in beta last December, Movieclips.com offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. And the startup launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.
Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc. The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL’s Moviefone is already using the technology on its platform.
One new feature the startup has recently added is “related clips,” which recommends similar clips to users in search. So when a user searches for a particular clip, he will be exposed to a wall of 100 related clips “related by” actor, movie, action, mood, setting, theme, director, prop, cinematographer, and many more categories. Movieclips says that since launching this feature, page views have increased by over 200%, as users fall into an addictive click trance from one clip to the next.
Another strategy Movieclips will be furthering is content curation and working on developing ways for visitors to find content on the site easily and quickly. This will include more lists of clips by topic and other parameters.
While the company only has clips from 1,400 movies, Zach James says these titles are all well-known, A list movies, such as Top Gun, Casablanca, and Wayne’s World. James says the site hasn’t tackled the longtail yet but will eventually expand to include niche movies.
The challenge for the site of course is working with the movie studios, who own the rights, to put the movies online. James says that if the movies are legal published on then web, then Movieclips will have the rights to post the clips. James says that the new funding will be used for future product development.
The company faces competition from AnyClip.