Well, I finally decided to give Ani­moto a try.

Animoto.com is a web appli­ca­tion that cre­ates MTV-style videos with the click of a button.

Users sim­ply choose a song and images. Ani­moto then auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates a unique video for them. No two videos are ever the same.

Many of the post-production tech­niques that the founders used while work­ing as pro­duc­ers for MTV, Com­edy Cen­tral & ABC are used in Animoto’s patent-pending Cin­e­matic Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence devel­oped to think like an actual edi­tor and direc­tor. The result­ing video is pro­duced in a widescreen for­mat, con­tain­ing the visual energy of a music video and the emo­tional impact of a movie trailer.

Ani­moto Pro­duc­tions is based in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

Here’s my first trial run video using my BYOBW 2008 photo set on Flickr.

I’m dig­ging it. I only wish the free account gives you more time. Maybe when they get their social net­work going, users can vote or give props to slideshows that have “poten­tial” to be remixed even fur­ther due to the amount of images and/or how good their sound­track is. But I’ll let Ani­moto decide on that algo­rithm. Another thing that would be cool is the idea of using tracks from Last.fm, Pan­dora, or ones like it. But I’m guess­ing Ani­moto would need ample time to ana­lyze those tracks before­hand to inject into their magic factory.

Mean­while, the ser­vice is priced well for Per­sonal Use, $25–30/year… just like Flickr’s. Don’t know if this is a long shot or not, but maybe incor­po­rate a deal with Flickr of get­ting a dis­counted mem­ber­ship. Any­ways, I can see myself pur­chas­ing a mem­ber­ship for Ani­moto. I fig­ure edit­ing a 3–5 minute video, and queu­ing music at the same time, takes a lot of time and patience and is well worth the $25–30. That’s only about a week’s worth of Lee’s Avo­cado Turkey sand­wiches that I can pass on—not bad at all.