As consumers of franchised media, we’re no strangers to stories of rights acquisitions and company mergers, but you don’t expect there to be licensing elements in a story about an eGreeting startup. I’m not so sure about Ditto Greetings in practice, but in concept, there is absolutely a large part of me that wants to send people Bill Pullman‘s Independence Day speech to people whenever it is even remotely relevant to their lives.
The way Ditto works is that they make licensing deals with major movie studios. Not to stream the movies or adapt them or make t-shirts or whatever. Rather, to be able to create free eGreeting cards for customers with embedded clips. Eventually Ditto plans to actually make money with ads on their site and by offering premium services that offer users extra features.
In other words, they haven’t really figured out how they’re going to make money yet, but they’re hoping the film industry will see them as a way to monetize their old releases: every card will include a link to buy the movie. They have also given some thought to what movies they don’t want to use in their cards:
Guns and violence are out, because Ditto wouldn’t want the cards to be used for threats. You also won’t find something like Schindler’s List, because as Belasco says, “Only something bad can happen if someone uses a clip from Schindler’s List in the wrong way.”
In the five minutes I played around with it, I think you might have to do some digging to find the goods. I suggest searching by movie, because I’m not sure that I ever would have thought to use Jurassic Park‘s Clever Girl clip as a “congrats on dating that chick” card.
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
