I pursued this idea with randomwalker for about 6 months before realizing there's absolutely no business value here. My advice to Nowmov: choose another market

I pursued this idea with randomwalker for about 6 months before realizing there's absolutely no business value here. My advice to Nowmov: choose another market before it's too late. We did, and it's been going much better for us. Fortunately, we didn't come across a strong celebrity endorsement like Ashton Kutcher's, so there was little cost to switching gears. The problem with video recommendations is content ownership. YouTube has a monopoly on user-generated content so they immediately became our number one risk. Our business was henceforth bound to their ToS. Shortly after we switched gears, the Totlol debacle surfaced on Hacker News, confirming our suspicions that the risk was too great for a business to tolerate. The main obstacle with the YouTube ToS is that they don't allow advertising on pages where the video content is the focal point of the page. Nowmov clearly focuses on videos, so the 'get-big-and-strike-it-rich' model is not an option for them. Moving beyond YouTube -- say, using licensed content -- cripples their product, because there simply isn't enough content to create a compelling recommendation engine. Even Hulu, being backed by industry giants, is bleeding content providers. I can't emphasize this enough: this is a cool product, but not a good business. We had cool algorithms that provided fantastic recommendations and kept users on our alpha site for an average of 13 minutes before adding any type of social features. "Pandora for videos" was dead simple to pitch, too. I wish NowMov the best of luck and I hope they can succeed where we failed. The world needs a product like this.