Paramount Digital Entertainment will make ultra-short clips from its movie vaults available to members of the There.com virtual world, letting members express their emotions via actual lines from movies as varied as “Clueless,” “Grease” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
The application, known as VooZoo, lets There.com members buy a short one-line movie clip—most only a few seconds long—and then insert them into text conversations they have with other members’ avatars as they move around the virtual world.
For example, rather than saying they plan to force someone to do something, members could actually call up a speech balloon (or “VooHoo”) that autoplays Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone making someone “an offer he can’t refuse.”
Users will be able to pay a one-time fee of about $1 for each bite-sized clip and will then have the right to use it as often as they wish. The clips will be streamed rather than downloaded.
The clips are similar to “emotes” that There.com members can already use to add feeling and nuance to their interactions in the world with smiles, laughing out loud or doing the twist to express joy.
The Voohoos come with links that let both parties in the conversation click back to the Paramount Digital Entertainment site, where they can purchase the movies clips, which come from through a third-party retailer such as Amazon.com.
In time,There.com members will have access to Voohoos from thousands of Paramount titles. Makena is currently checking the stock of clips to guarantee that they all come from movies rated PG-13, since There.com brands itself as a safe virtual environment for ages 13 and up.
There.com said that in coming months it will make the VooZoo application available to users of MTV Networks’ vMTV virtual world, which operates on the There.com platform. MTV content will also be available in the VooZoo application.
“VMTV marries the great programming of television with the unparalleled interactivity of the Internet,” Jeff Yapp, MTV’s executive vice president of program enterprises said in a statement. “With the VooZoo application, our audience can have an even deeper level with the popular motion pictures and television franchises they love.”
The VooZoo clips are streamed rather than downloaded to avoid concerns about piracy—something that has proved a stumbling block for the major studios in their efforts to get their full-movie content out to online consumers. Several studios and TV production companies—including Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures—have sued video aggregation sites such as You Tube in an effort to force them to remove from their play lists short scenes of copyrighted material posted by fans.
Last month, Paramount Digital Entertainment announced a deal to offer the VooZoo service to Face book members on the same onetime-fee basis.
“But a clip in Face book isn’t anywhere near as valuable as a clip in a virtual world,” Wilson said.
A demo video shows VooZoo in action on There.com.
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