AnyClip Search Engine Brings You Any Moment From Any Movie
Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 17, 2009
We’ve been keeping a bit of an eye on the TechCrunch 50, which took place earlier this week in San Francisco, to try and spy and cool movie-related tech companies who showed up to present there. And lo and behold, we found one. It is a startup called AnyClip, a company hell bent on you being able to search “Nobody fucks with the Jesus” and instantly being able to watch the famous John Turturro delivery from The Big Lebowski. It is an online application that will allow you to find “any moment from any film ever made,” something that will certainly help settle quite a few arguments here at Reject HQ about the exact dialog used in certain movies.
They’ve built this system around the combination of public sources (using closed captions and subtitles) and integrating that information with a manual interface. The manual interface (which is currently controlled by AnyClip engineers, but may someday be open to all users) allows for special annotations to be made. And while there is a similar feature on YouTube with the Annotation feature, this is clearly different. It focuses solely on movies and weeds out all of the other junk that pops up on YouTube.
As I’m sure you will agree, there’s a definite interest in a service like this one — the ability to find our favorite moments from any movie ever made is one that feels about as futuristic as any, but it appears to be happening in the near future. And from what I can see in the TechCrunch demo (video below), AnyClip combines this innovative idea with a clean, manageable interface. It’s something that I know I would use, and I’m pretty sure you would use it, too. The only question marks that remain are licensing (something that I’m sure studios would be interested in, as it allows them to create a back catalog of their films in 5-minute pieces, but also helps sell their films via iTunes, Amazon, etc.) and venture capital to find enough space and bandwidth to deliver this vision to the world. I don’t see that second one being much of a problem, as this little startup is about to get a lot of attention, at least from those of us in the movie blogosphere.
AnyClip is currently in private beta, but you can sign up to receive an invite on their site. We’re currently lobbying for an invite so that we might be able to bring you a more informed review of the service, so if anyone out there has one, please send it over to me. Watch the TechCrunch 50 demo below:
Also, check out this energetic trailer about AnyClip’s service:
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