Movieclips on Tuesday announced that it had raised a $7 million round of funding and partnered with YouTube to bring its 20,000 HD movie clips to a much bigger audience.
“First and foremost, this helps studios eliminate piracy because these are licesened clips,” Movieclips co-founder Zach James told VentureBeat. “And it helps users too. Instead of searching for your favorite scene from Scarface and finding a scene done by kindergartners, you’ll get to watch the actual movie clip.”
Not only will studios have less of their clips pirated on YouTube, but the partnership lets studios, Movieclips, and YouTube split ad revenue. The model is similar to what Vevo and Machinima already do for music and gaming videos.
The $7 million funding round is being led by MK Capital, which is also the largest investor in Machinima.
“As the once-huge DVD market continues to be rapidly replaced by online movie purchases, rentals and subscriptions, we believe a searchable video-based clip experience will be the preferred way most movie fans will discover and select movies,” said Mark Terbeek, a partner at MK Capital, in a statement.
James said Movieclips is working hard to greatly expand its network of clips to 100,000 and plans to include things like trailers, on-set visits, interviews with movie stars, and special features.
“We want this to be the network for video about movies, not just movie clips themselves,” James said. “Soon it will be a much bigger and more diverse collection.”
I for one love re-watching my favorite film scenes (like this one), so the partnership between Movieclips and YouTube is great for movie fanatics, who want high-quality clips, and studios, which are looking for new ways to monetize online videos.
In an effort to create the best application for the upcoming Lollapalooza 2011 music festival, the fest opened up its API and held a hackathon.
Remember when mapping out which shows to see at a music fest involved grabbing a calendar from your local alternative news weekly and circling stuff? Well, those days are waning, as evidenced by Lolla’s most recent foray into app creation, a contest called HackLolla, launched on May 6 at Music Hack Day.
To crowdsource the perfect app for the fest, Lolla opened up its API (including data about artists, schedules, events), and furnished additional APIs from Soundcloud, Echo Nest, and Songkick.
From this contest, Lolla garnered 19 entries — from schedule planners to livestreaming apps to games — and after public voting, they’ll choose two to be featured at the festival in August.
We took a look at the 19 candidates, and it seems like a lot of the devs took the fest scheduler approach. That’s all well and good — every fest needs a show calendar (I used the hell out of the Festival Explorer Austin Edition at SXSW) — but some of the more creative apps, such as Set Pickr, which asks users to predict a band’s setlist, intrigued us more.
Check out the gallery below and let us know which of the 19 hacks would be most useful to you at a music festival.
The Showcal
This web app show artists’ Facebook photos and fan count, music videos from YouTube, links to social media pages, and info on what time they go on stage. The Showcal also recommends bands to see based on bands you’re already a fan of.
Who’s Now Who’s Next
This Android app does what it sounds like it does — shows you who’s performing now and who’s next. It also recommends bands to see.
Pilolo
Apparently, this iOS app identifies the band playing via “geolocation,” and lets you follow the band by shaking your phone. It also includes artist info, the ability to buy music and info on upcoming shows.
iLollapalooza
This iOS app provides artist info, updates and music video playback using VEVO.
Plan-A-Palooza
This Android app features artist lookup, a personalized event schedule and an interactive map of the festival.
Lolla Nation
This is an interactive web app that lets you figure out which artists to follow and get updates from.
Lolla Search
This Android app is basically a planning app that lets you add shows to your calendar. You can get reminders for shows and alerts when you try to double book. It also has a map with info about who’s playing on all the stages.
Lolla2011
This iOs app is similar to Lolla Search. Plan your schedule and get alerts about upcoming shows.
Lollamania
Another planning app (mobile web), this time featuring info about hotels, after-parties, parking and taxi services.
Lollapalooza Is Your Friend
From the makers of AudioVroom, this hack adds the fest to your list of friends in-app, and generates a Lolla playlist.
LollapalooBox
This livestreaming web app lets those without tickets attend the fest virtually.
LollaScope
Similar to Songkick and Festival Explorer Austin Edition, this app scans your iTunes library and suggest bands based on your tastes.
Droplat
This Android app creates sharing folders tied to every band at every stage. Check in to share photos, recordings and video with other users based on location.
Guessbook
This iOS app is a trivia game that plugs into Facebook to test your musical knowledge as well as how well you know your friends.
MyLollapalooza
Another festival guide for the mobile web featuring a map, band info, stage info and a survival guide.
Cellulight
It’s a lighter. On your Android phone.
Set Pickr
Guess which songs a band will play based on previous set lists, and compete against other players.
Veokami
Watch sets from Lolla 2011 — in the form of fan-sourced YouTube videos — from multiple angles. Tag and comment on videos, and share them with your friends.
Bandcast
Basically a group texting app for Lolla, Bandcast lets you send status updates, tips and private messages, share schedules, find friends, and connect with new friends by scanning their unique QR codes.
More About: HackLolla, Lollapalooza, music, music-hack
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According to CNET, Google will unveil its cloud music service, Music Beta, at the I/O Developer Conference. The free service will be invitation-only (and US-only) at launch, and it will allow users to upload up to 20,000 songs onto Google’s servers and stream that music to many web-connected devices.
If all that sounds good to you, here’s the monkey wrench: the service won’t work on iOS devices, because Google has (perhaps deliberately) hobbled it by requiring support for Flash Player. While this means the service will work on PCs, Macs and some Android devices, any iPhone, iPod touch or iPad owners will be forced to use alternative services, like Amazon’s Cloud Player or Apple’s presumably forthcoming “iCloud” service.
Like Amazon, Google hasn’t secured licensing deals with the major music labels before launching its music streaming service. Unlike Amazon, Google doesn’t have its own music store to assist in monetizing that service, and by choosing to utilize Flash in its implementation, Google’s also shut out over 100 million potential mobile users from Music Beta. Google, of course, has a “convenient” answer for any iOS users wanting to use Music Beta — buy an Android device — but those of us who are unwilling to do so will either flock to Amazon’s service or hope that Apple comes out with something superior.
The forerunner to Dan Deacon, Project Jenny, Project Jan and myriad other bands of that ilk has passed away. Max Mathews, widely known as the progenitor of digital music, died Thursday of pneumonia.
Mathews wrote a program called “Music” in 1957 that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second jam. He also developed other electronic music software and devices as an engineer at Bell Laboratories.
Since Mathew’s death, Mashable reporter Jolie O’Dell recalled a video she made at the SF MusicTech Summit last year in which Mathew spoke about innovation. We felt the video is worthy of sharing again.
“The future will lie in better understanding of what sounds or what sound sequences turn on the pleasure center in the human brain. And the answer to finding this out will lie not in the technology of the machines, the instruments, the computers, but rather will lie in understanding how our brains interpret music,” Mathews said at the time.
Movieclips on Tuesday announced that it had raised a $7 million round of funding and partnered with YouTube to bring its 20,000 HD movie clips to a much bigger audience.
