Clipped chat
The next time a friend sends you a text message asking some annoying question such as who they should vote for on American Idol, imagine that instead of just ignoring the text, you can send them a clip from a movie or TV show, asking them to 'use the Force, Luke'.
This is one of the dreams of an Israeli company called Anyclip, whose grand vision, according to a recent report in The New York Observer, is to turn film studio vaults into a database accessible to users of the internet and mobile devices everywhere.
Earlier this month, the company went public with its first humble product, a Facebook.com application called Casting Couch that lets you 'tag' your friends' names on to characters in famous movie scenes, and share these witty associations with as many more friends as you want.
The premise of Casting Couch is the marginally clever realisation that movies are so much a part of our lives that we often use quotes from them to tell people how we're feeling or even to help describe what just happened to us.
At present, Casting Couch has scenes from a couple of dozen movies for tagging, including The Godfather, Animal House, Shaun of the Dead and others. Creatively speaking, Anyclip's ideas aren't terribly exciting. Inserting clips into digital conversations seems a small step up from emoticons.
And though appropriation can be quite creative - there are plenty of fan films out there that attest to this - the general rule seems to be that as appropriation is made easier and more automatic, it comes closer and closer to mere parroting.
But businesswise, bringing Hollywood's film catalogue to Web 2.0 is similar to what ring tones did for digital music - providing a model for content to go digital that is not only controllable, copyright protected and profitable, it is also new to the medium.
Casting Couch is free and Anyclip's business model at present seems to rely on two things: web advertisements and driving DVD sales of the films it excerpts. So one has to wonder how sexy the product will appear to Hollywood studio executives.
But compared to having hundreds of thousands of copies of a film distributed via BitTorrent for zero profit, putting clips in users' hands seems to pose much less of a risk. Also, Star Trek and Star Wars, two of the biggest franchises in TV and film history, were built in part by letting fans run wild with their identity fantasies. Fans were publishing their own Star Trek stories by the late 1960s, and Star Wars fanzines were more or less legitimised by George Lucas from the early 80s on. A similar fan phenomenon is now happening with Harry Potter.
Big movie studios would do well to learn a lesson. Films such as Scarface or Austin Powers may not generate fan conventions but they are highly quotable. For films such as these, new media could give marketing campaigns momentum to snowball like never before.
Casting Couch is still far from offering that kind of potential. But if people will pay for ring tones, one can also imagine that in the not so distant future, they'll also buy video clips to slide into phone calls or video chats.
