Tim Harader, president of Hypershow Ltd., with the "School of Rock" Windows Phone movie app, first in a series that the company is working on with Paramount Digital Entertainment. (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

Windows Phone users who buy the movie “School of Rock” for their devices can tap their mobile screens to learn more about the objects, actors, locations, music and other elements of scenes. When they’re done, they can create custom clips of their favorite moments. Or they can activate a trivia mode to see related factoids as they watch.

This is not your basic motion picture, or even your basic digital stream. It’s an application, or app — an individual movie, with interactive features, packaged in its very own piece of downloadable software.

Yes, even movies can be apps these days. And maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. Fueled by the popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices, apps are becoming the delivery mechanism of choice for many technology companies.

The American Dialect Society declared “app” its 2010 word of the year, and the trend prompted Wired magazine to declare the web “dead,” with more and more internet content moving from open web pages to siloed applications.

Seattle startup Hypershow Ltd. isn’t being so strident. But in certain situations — such as movies and concert videos — the company sees big potential in apps dedicated to specific pieces of content, offering viewers enhanced experiences and promising major media studios a better online business model.

Hypershow specializes in interactive media technology, such as giving users the ability to tap or click on objects in a video to find out more about them. The independent company, founded last year by Microsoft veterans Tim Harader and Dan Gehred, worked with Paramount Digital Entertainment on the “School of Rock” app. Selling for $9.99, it’s the first in a series of individual movie apps that Paramount plans to release for Windows Phone 7, the Redmond company’s revamped mobile-phone operating system.

In addition to Windows Phones, Hypershow’s technology can be used in applications for Windows PCs, Macs and set-top boxes running Microsoft’s Windows Embedded or Media Center software, taking the interactive content onto large screens in the living room. The startup is also exploring the possibility of offering Hypershow-based apps on other types of mobile phones.

The idea is to help studios “take their high-value content and really make it a special experience,” said Harader, the president of Hypershow. “By doing these as separate applications, we provide (the studios) a way to make unique experiences on a per-film basis, rather than having them on a service or a template application that houses many films.”

Hypershow is focusing first on apps that run on Microsoft’s Silverlight interactive technology. Gehred, Hypershow’s chief technology officer, was one of the inventors of the Silverlight Enhanced Movie technology during his time at Microsoft.

Asked about the possibility of more studios offering movie apps, a Microsoft representative said via email that all major studios and development partners have access to the developers kit for Silverlight Enhanced Movies so they can create movies for PC, Mac and Windows Phone 7. The company said it sees interactive movie apps as a way of bringing out digital versions of films that will be as good or better than physical versions of films such as DVDs.

But one challenge with individual apps is that most consumers want to pay for content only once, if at all, and access it across a range of screens, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with the Gartner Inc. research firm.

For example, someone who streams a Netflix movie on a TV is currently able to finish it later in a Netflix app on a mobile device. That’s easier with a unified service, offering many pieces of content across multiple machines, as opposed to a dedicated app for a specific movie.

“Particularly when they’re purchasing content, consumers are increasingly looking to have that content playable on many different devices,” Gartenberg said via phone this week.

It would be technically possible to play one Hypershow application across different devices, Harader said. However, differences in processor speed, screen size, storage volume and input mechanism between a mobile phone and a computer, for example, make it more practical to offer separate apps for each type of device.

That means it will ultimately be up to the studios and other content distributors to decide whether it makes business sense to let consumers use different versions of the same movie on multiple devices for a single price. With a premium-priced product, such as a movie on Blu-ray disc, that might be more likely, Harader said. With a lower-priced product, such as a $4.99 mobile app, it’s more likely that consumers will need to pay an incremental fee for viewing rights on additional devices.

Even without that cross-platform capability, the “School of Rock” app for Windows Phone 7 has been well-received. Released on Dec. 14, it has garnered an average customer rating of 4 1/2 out of 5 stars in the Windows Phone marketplace. One reason it works well with the Hypershow format is that users can learn more about the music being played throughout the film. Another feature, the pop-up “SceneIt?” trivia mode, is the result of a partnership with Seattle-based Screenlife Games.

Hypershow believes movie apps will help Hollywood studios by complementing rather than cannibalizing their current models of distribution. For example, someone who sees “School of Rock” in the theater or on DVD might not be interested in watching it again in basic streaming form. But that same person might still be interested in the new type of interactive experience provided by the “School of Rock” movie app.

In addition, studios will be able to use the Hypershow-based apps to deliver ongoing updates to users, such as updated movie trailers with the latest releases. In some cases, those updates could create new e-commerce opportunities for the studios, in much the same way that video-game publishers have begun offering new levels and other downloadable content for their titles. Movie publishers, for example, could charge an extra 99 cents to access a new director’s commentary inside a Hypershow app.

Harader says Hypershow is profitable and has deals with additional movie studios in the pipeline.