After launching in the US last month, French startup Spideo launched it’s video recommendation iPad app in France today. Founded by Gabriel Mandelbaum. Thibault d’Orso, and Paul de Monchy, the team has been working in video recommendation since 2010, powering video recommendations for the online video catalogs of such publishers as Canal+ in their CanalPlay Inifinity catalog.
Relying on their Envideo discovery engine, Spideo brings a Pandora-like recommendations, evolving over time and tailored to your efforts. I’ve played around with recommendation sites like Jinni.com in the past, and while the initial wow-effect of seeing great movies recommendations is nice, I quickly felt that static nature of the site. Spideo promises more than that, and while it’s hard to see how well recommendations will hold up over time, I am confident that Spideo will hold up to the test of time – at least longer than anyone else has.
Will Spideo do for Movies what Foursquare did for Location?
I think what I’m looking for more now is a place where I feel comfortable storing my “movie data.” I’ve got my location data on Foursquare, my restaurant preferences on Yelp, my social data on Facebook – by the way, Facebook tried to get all my interest data too, but all the ended up getting was a list of my friends.
While Spideo can obviously subsist as a focused advertising platform for content publishers (YouTube, Hulu, movies, tv, etc.) with its information on users’ movie interests, I wonder who would be interested in knowing information about my movie preferences, and how much value would that have for websites focused on the film industry? IMDB? Hulu? YouTube?
For now, I’m content to have someone recommending me good movies to see – but if they are going to learn about my movie preferences, they better contribute to making the world more passive by allowing other sites to harness that information about me.