Whipclip Launches So You Can Legally Share Your Favorite TV Moments

There’s a lot of talk about how social media has become the new watercooler for discussing TV’s funny, crazy, or otherwise memorable moments. What’s been more hit-or-miss, however, is finding the actual footage that everyone’s talking about.

Sure, networks are putting more and more of their clips online, but it’s not necessarily the clip that you’re looking for, and even then, it might not go live until hours or days later. And of course, people find, uh, more creative ways to share this content, but I don’t actually enjoy watching a YouTube video of someone pointing their iPhone camera at their TV screen, you know?

So a startup called Whipclip is launching an iPhone app of the same name today that makes it easy and legal to find and share some of your favorite TV clips. the company is led by CEO and co-founder Richard Rosenblatt, who previously co-founded Demand Media, and it raised a $20 million round of funding last year.

COO Dan Brian gave me a demo of the app a couple of weeks ago. The focus, he said, is on live TV — the moment when something happens on-screen that makes you say, “Whoa, people need to see this.” So it’s easy to open the app, choose your show from the list of what’s playing now, and select a clip from the last two minutes of footage. Then you can share that clip within the app, as well as on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Those of you who are watching time-delayed or on-demand TV aren’t being left out, though — you can also create clips of shows that aren’t airing right at that second, finding the right moment by searching the show’s closed captioning. And you can create clips from music videos, too.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Whipclip is the fact that it’s signed up a broad list of content partners, including Comedy Central, ABC, CBS, FOX, VH1, A+E Network, Lifetime, Bloomberg, OWN, truTV, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music. (Brian acknowledged that some of those partners see this as an experiment, and are only giving Whipclip access to a few shows to start.)

The app launch was timed to coincide with the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber (scheduled for Monday, March 30, at 10pm), which should generate lots of hilarious and/or cringeworthy moments readymade for social media sharing.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/xl2cPbqPBwI/

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