I-play has teamed up with Universal to launch Hollywood Movie Minutes, which will stream video clips of famous scenes from Universal’s catalog of movies, several months later than originally planned—initial scenes include John Belushi’s food fight scene from Animal House, Steve Carell’s wax job in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, or the battle between Kong and the T-Rex in King Kong. Both companies are using the initiative to diversify their efforts in mobile content.

“We start with those moments we believe are most entertaining for the core mobile video consumer, then we filter by what looks best on a 2-inch screen and then filter again based on our ability to make the clips available,” said Jeremy Laws, Senior Vice President at Universal Mobile Entertainment, in an e-mail interview with MocoNews.

The clips will be 1-3 minutes long depending on the scene, and the price will be determined by carrier—Sprint will offer a selection of 15 clips with a new one each day on a $3.99 per month subscription basis, for example, while Verizon will stream them through V-cast for $1.99 each. Deals have also been signed with Rogers, Helio and Amp’d. The service uses I-plays proprietary I-player technology, which allows users to tag clips as favorites.

The licensing agreement was announced in September last year with a prediction that the service would be live in 2006. “One of the major challenges with bringing a product like this to market is getting the talent rights cleared, but we’ve been lucky enough to work with Universal and Corbis who are experts in this business,” David Gosen, CEO of I-play, told MocoNews. He added that when launching new products it’s important to get quality, deliverability and breadth of content right at the beginning. “Quality takes time.”

For Universal, mobile content revenues are a small but growing part of the companies revenue. Historically Universal’s mobile strategy has focused on movie-themed games, but hopes that video products (“video clips, video ringers, voicetones, value-added graphics and made-for-mobile entertainment”) will be a substantial part of its revenue mix in the future. “Our strategy is to diversify and innovate our mobile content product mix and our channels of distribution, while continuing to focus on quality,” said Laws. “Hollywood Movie Minutes is a key component of that strategy.”

Universal is also exploring using other kinds of video content such as bloopers, deleted scenes actor and interviews and so on, although the company has traditionally used this content for mobile marketing, said Laws.

I-play’s move into video is easily understandable—predictions for the future market sizes of mobile gaming and mobile video are all over the place, but getting a revenue stream from another business segment can’t be considered a bad idea, unless it distracts from the core business. However, Gosen obviously doesn’t think this is the case, and believes I-play has an advantage of being able to “leverage its strong relationships with Hollywood studios and to utilize the full capabilities of its proprietary content delivery platform”.