Plizy is an interesting new startup which wants to bring personalized video content to the iPad [iTunes link] the company has also announced a $1.2m angel funding round from undisclosed investors.
Plizy wants users to discover, share and watching online video based on your social graph, history, and interests. It sounds like a few other startups we could mention, and competitors might best be described as ShowYou or Pandora. In fact, there is an element here of “Flipboard meets Pandora” for video.
So Plizy is addressing the problem of people not really knowing where to start when they want to watch online video. There’s just too much to deal with. So Plizy attamepts to recommend videos based on what you like according to a ‘patent pending’ recommendation engine which collects content for you using your existing graphs (including Facebook and Twitter).
Plizy is launching as an iPad app, but the platform plans to roll out to other connected devices, including TVs, set-top boxes and other tablets.
Certainly the team behind it is very experienced. CEO Jonathan Benassaya is a sel-described “entrepreholic” who has been a founder on the French tech scene for some time, on startups such as music service Deezer, MagicParty and ViGaO. CTO Laurent Cerveau has worked at Apple, designing the first architecture for audio drivers on MacOS X and co-founding mobileo.
At launch, Plizy features content from Revision 3, as well as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. Not that hard to do of course, and one wonders if this will be anything more than an unnecessary layer over all those existing networks if it fails to deliver the right content. We shall see.
