To be five-years-old again.

I regularly find myself imagining what it would be like to experience childhood through the technology-enhanced lens of the modern world. From cartoons rendered with mind-blowing CGI and in full HD -- not to mention no longer restricted to the weekends -- to touch screens and Facetime while parents travel for work, life as a youngster must be pretty magical.

Today, Santa Monica-based digital entertainment startup JibJab Bros Studios is adding one more experience to that magical list with its acquisition of Make Believe Labs and its Hello Santa service for an undisclosed sum. The service allow parents to set up personalized live and pre-recorded video calls with Santa Claus. Imagine that first time your kindergartener comes home from school crying because there’s no santa being able to line up a video chat with the big guy in which he knows your kids name, his dog’s name, and what he wants for Christmas. Magic restored.

“We believe the Santa myth is ripe for reinvention,” says JibJab co-founder and CEO Gregg Spiridellis.

Hello Santa has been around for several years, but its founders Dorian Collier Jordan Lyall, and Sam Dassanayake, all of whom will join JibJab, simply lacked the resources to grow it beyond a local niche product. JibJab, which is approaching its 15th birthday and has been profitable for many years running according to Spiridellis, will invest significantly in scaling the reach and underlying infrastructure of the Hello Santa product.

The Hello Santa app will go live in the iOS App Store on November 1 and will allow parents to request chats with St. Nick beginning on November 28 (Black Friday) through December 24 (Christmas Eve). Parents will also get a picture-in-picture recording of all live and pre-recorded calls. JibJab is still finalizing pricing, but expect a pre-recorded call to be in the neighborhood of $10 and a live call to be under $30. The company has 200 Santas trained and onboarded to its platform and is aiming to deliver thousands of videos interactions this holiday season.

For JibJab, as cool and magical as today’s version of Hello Santa is, there’s an entire world of possibilities for how the company plans to leverage and extend the concept. The first, is that JibJab’s family of entertainment brands also includes StoryBots, an educational digital video and storybook franchise aimed at young kids that will benefit mightily from the cross-promotion and lead-generation muscle of this sure-to-be-popular holiday service. The same is true of JibJab’s other franchise JibJab eCards. JibJab currently attracts over 50 million unique monthly visitors to its franchise of online properties during the holiday season, according to the company.

But underlying Make Believe Labs, the most valuable asset may be the talent management and booking platform that the company is currently putting in place. Spiridellis envisions a future in which the company offers on-demand interactions with all manner of fantasy characters, with possibilities including Disney princesses, Marvel superheroes, and so forth, licensing and partnerships permitting. To put it in the Silicon Valley lexicon, call it “Uber for fantasy.”

“From the earliest days when my brother and I started this in New York in 1999 to the launch of eCards in 2007 which really put us on the map, the premise underlying JibJab has always been content as a utility,” Spiridellis says. “Too much of content has become a commodity, so in everything we do, we look to add utility to content. I think Hello Santa fits squarely within that vision. We look at it as being a lot like a live, on-demand television show.”

JibJab has raised $17.9 million across three rounds of funding, the most recent being a $7.5 million Series C in 2009. The 50-person company has been profitable for the last several years, according to Spiridellis, largely on the strength of eCards subscriptions. Diversifying beyond its core product makes good business sense for the company, and to the extent that it can cross-promote and generate leads between brands, it's all the better.

As Spiridellis notes, commodity content is everywhere on the web. But truly creative and utility-adding content is anything but. Using technology to restore the magic of Christmas or to one day connect a young child with their favorite fantasy character is about the furthest thing from a commodity. There’s an argument to be made that most kids could benefit from putting down the iPad or video game controller and spending more time outside or interacting with others in-person. But when technology and a few bucks from parents can add a bit more magic to their childrens’ lives, it makes the notion of being a kid again seem that much more enticing.

[Image via Puzzler4879]