While Google says it wants to index the world's content, it hasn't done made much progress in Hollywood. But an Israeli start-up called AnyClip has already indexed hundreds of movies in the Universal Pictures library.
Using advanced audio and object recognition software, and an army of 1800 film viewers/taggers, the Jerusalem/Los Angeles-based company has indexed over 200 Universal movies with as many as 5,000 distinct pieces of metadata per film.
The company manages its army of 1800 film viewers/taggers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.
The company was founded in 2008 by Mickey Schulof, former head of Sony Pictures, and Erel Margalit, one of Israel's most successful venture capitalists. The company was designated a TechCrunch 50 in 2009.
Last week at the Bloomberg Media Summit, we spoke with Oren Nauman, CEO. He tells us about the company and its strategy. Currently, films are indexed on the AnyClip site. Users can share short clips of movie results, and can order them via a Netflix account or on Amazon. Some are linked to iTunes.
Nauman explains that the objective is not to create a consumer destination, but a search tool to be used by film and television e-commerce and fans sites. More deals are in the works.
News of the AnyClip deal with Universal was published last week by the Hollywood Reporter.
Update 3.17: The company announced it will provide its tagging services to the winners of the SXSW film awards.
In November in Monaco, Beet.TV spoke with Margalit about technology innovation in Israel and the work of the big venture fund he founded, JVP. We have republished that interview below.
Andy Plesser
