

Nowmov (YC W10): Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream of Videos - thomaspun
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/yc-funded-nowmov-sit-back-relax-and-watch-an-endless-stream-of-youtube-videos/

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campnic
I found one funny video and a bunch of random spanish stuff and a lot of pop
music. Not sure I see what this has besides some novelty, sorry guys.

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earle
Yeah this is nothing more than a simple technological stunt. What's the value
in this, and to whom? Just because a bunch of random clicks on Twitter or
Youtube think something is popular doesn't equate to meaningfulness to me.

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jfb
We agree, and we're working on making the streams personal and more
meaningful. But Twitter popularity is an interesting proxy for overall
popularity, and we've seen some stuff bubble up much faster than other video
sites. It's a work in progress.

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danhak
I don't mean to be too discouraging, but I really don't understand the point
of this as a business. It seems like something that anybody could code in
about five minutes, and YouTube itself has started to add playlist
functionality.

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riffer
Recommendations is an 11-figure business. Seriously. This is a pretty
reasonable angle of approach, so I can understand that part.

What I have trouble with is what chaosmachine points out: the recommendations
are not that good. At least from a cold start.

How does this have 18 votes in 16 minutes? At a time when the site is pretty
quiet? That is _very_ suspicious.

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jackowayed
_> How does this have 18 votes in 16 minutes? At a time when the site is
pretty quiet? That is very suspicious._

I'm sure it's nothing nefarious. But a good number of people who use this site
have strong affinity for YC startups either because they're YC alums or just
they're people who really like YC startups and feel like part of the YC
community due to being members on this site and having watched YC grow.

I would guess that a subset of said people will basically upvote anything
about a YC startup. And launches are especially prone to this treatment
because people think that users of this site will find any YC launch
interesting (which many users will).

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ephermata
I upvoted it because I worked on a similar idea with abossy and randomwalker.
I agree with abossy's comment above: this is a great idea, I wish them all the
best and I hope they kick ass, but the business side is difficult. So long as
you rely on YouTube for videos, you are at the mercy of changes to the YouTube
terms of service. You can look for other sources of videos besides YouTube,
but this is challenging.

So I'm hoping they succeed where I failed. Hence the upvote.

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adityakothadiya
Sometimes I'm more interested in knowing the thought process of PG and YC
about why they decided to invest in such idea. What they see this as a
business opportunity? Or technology opportunity? Or just big market
opportunity? What is it that made PG and YC to invest in this?

And this is just out of curiosity - to learn what they have seen that I'm
missing and cannot see.

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pg
It seemed to me a pretty good hypothesis about what the future of TV would
look like. Roughly Nowmov has the same relation to watching TV that Reddit
does to a newspaper or magazine. The format's similar, but instead of getting
what one media co chooses to pipe down the channel at you, you see a
collection of smaller things from all sorts of different sources (both big
media cos and individual people), and the best stuff floats to the top.

Nowmov is not very good yet at finding the best stuff, obviously, but they
only just launched. You have to imagine what it looks like when it can
customize per user.

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adityakothadiya
Fair enough. I totally believe that don't judge startups from where they are
now, but judge them based on where they will be after few years.

I just had a different experience when I met you the other day at Chirp and
demoed our app. It was a 4 month app developed in the part-time, has a decent
traction, and growing at decent rate, but with great potential in future. I
was more interested in explaining you my vision and getting your feedback on
it, but it seemed like you gave lot of emphasis on its current usefulness and
didn't seem to imagine how great and useful the app would be in few months.

So I was just curious, how your thought process works. But I'm glad that you
seem to believe in the approach of what we potentially can achieve based on
what we have achieved so far.

Thanks for your reply!

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jasonlbaptiste
Sure, I could write it off as the: omg where is the fucking business model
this is such a toy on what is only iteration1! I'm not going to. There are
smart people involved and im sure this is a small piece to a bigger puzzle.

Here's what interests me: it makes video online more like tv. ive been reading
mark cuban's articles and some others. i want a more tv like experience ie-
things start playing instantly as i navigate.

good job guys and keep up the good work.

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jfb
We explicitly want to mimic the TV experience; we think that the page 'o
videos + ad links is a sub-optimal way to watch user generated content. Think
about how much video is uploaded to the Tube every day -- something like 24
hrs per minute -- and think about the discovery problem that presents. TV +
discovery is what we're aiming for.

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robryan
It's true that discovery can be a problem. It's interesting though to tackle
it by trying to emulate TV, the thing that that online video has been trying
to move away from as a selling point.

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chaosmachine
It gave me 4 spanish language videos in a row, despite thumbs-downing them.

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fraXis
Me too. A filter based on language selection would be nice.

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zaius
It's work in progress. We had one in there, but it wasn't reliable enough.

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kashif
I actually liked it. I watched for an hour straight. I think the comments are
a tad biased because the folks who liked it probably didn't come back to
comment immediately. I am pretty happy with the variety of stuff nowmov showed
me. The recommendation algo could use a bit of work. Keep at it.

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thomaspun
Thx. Glad u like it. We are working hard on the recommendation engine.

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ComputerGuru
I'm sorry, but your recommendation algorithm just plain sucks.

It's so basic and ridiculous of an idea to just take the most popular twitter
links and stream them one after the other. Recommendation Engines isn't a joke
and isn't anything even remotely easy (see the netflix challenge). There are a
million factors including age, location, culture, topic, timing, etc. and your
engine (as far as I can tell) fails to take _any_ of these into consideration
_even when being told_ through the thumbs-up/down buttons.

Sorry if I came across as being very harsh, it's just that this is a good idea
very, very poorly executed. I hate to see this idea bombing because you're
underestimating its complexities.

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brezina
The data this company will be able to collect at scale could be valuable in
and of itself.

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abossy
That's true of any company; it's a matter of reaching scale in the first
place.

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zaius
It's a step by step process :)

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mburney
I was just thinking of buying cable TV today because I never feel like
internet media allows me to just turn my brain off and relax. This product
seems like a great solution. I don't think these guys need to emphasize
personalized/customized content, but rather they need to find content with
universal appeal. In other words stuff that is tolerable enough to watch but
not _too interesting_ for any particular user, because interesting TV requires
too much brain power.

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joubert
Have you tried netflix?

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brezina
welp, i'm back after using nowmov. thanks to nowmov i found one of the coolest
youtube videos i've seen in a while
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0> Google Chrome speed tests

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ojbyrne
"Interesting sidenote: Ashton Kutcher is actually directly responsible for
this site existing; the Nowmov guys were considering working on another idea
until Kutcher told Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston
that he wanted something like this. Kutcher decided to invest in and advise
the startup, and Nowmov became a reality."

It's the kiss of death.

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allantyoung
Does Kutcher have enough of a track record to compare him to the cover of
Sports Illustrated at this point?

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edkennedy
I enjoy how it feels similar to chatroulette. The 'next' feeling allows you to
quickly skip through unwanted videos. What felt intuitive and I was
disappointed was not implemented was up and down arrows to give a thumbs up or
thumbs down. Another feature I felt lacking was the ability to full screen. A
recommendation system could dramatically improve the quality. Perhaps based on
the amount of time before the 'next' button is clicked. I see this platform as
being addictive, easy to monetize and should quickly build a fanbase.

After a bit of digging I found some good videos. An informative video of
liquid mountaineering, the art of walking on water, had me chuckling.

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jfb
Thanks for the kind words! We're working feverishly on features, some of which
are mentioned here and otherwhere on the page. Please keep checking in (or
follow @nowmov on Twitter).

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JesseAldridge
I can't help but notice the lack of YouTube ads. Are they being stripped out
or something?

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zaius
We drop everything that isn't embeddable without ads.

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TotlolRon
As far as I can tell you are using the chromeless player. I've been using this
for two years now at Totlol.

Can you elaborate at a technical level what is it exactly that you "drop"?

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zaius
Yep, it's the chromeless player. We grab videos links from twitter, then we
use the youtube data api to drop videos where the embed access control is
disabled.

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TotlolRon
Ah. That has nothing to do with ads.

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arihant
I love this. I am coding on my Mac with Nowmov playing on my other laptop.
Love how I can use keyboard to control.

I don't know about your algo, so it would be a nice addition to let people
have accounts and then guess videos based on what they liked before, it will
eliminate the need to touch keyboard to skip videos, overtime. :)

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maxwin
Unless the team is really smart and very good at various recommendation
algorithms and mathematical tricks(which is not doing so well now),I don't see
them going anywhere. Everyone can pull out the videos overnight using the
Youtube API but only everyone can write a good filtering algorithm to decide
what to show.

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necrecious
Recommendation algorithms are not that tricky, anyone can get 90% of the best
algorithm in a couple of weeks. (OK, maybe not anyone, but my friend at Google
did it for fun to compete in Netflix competition.)

The thing recommendation engines need is data and lots of it, which Youtube
has in spades and these guys have to start from scratch.

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rameshnid
Meta-ness is a disease plaguing the web. That aside I wonder how they are
going to monetize it?

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daniel-cussen
I could see this for parties, as in, you hit play and all it spits back is Pop
and Techno and Raggaeton for hours on end. That would be really nice. I would
pay $10 for four-seven hours of it if it did that well.

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jfornear
Very cool. I thought about pursuing an idea similar to this after spending
nearly 2 hours (it felt like 10 minutes...) on <http://wimp.com> the other
day.

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yosho
without the ability to like or dislike a video and to personalize the stream,
this is essentially useless for most people.

Pandora for video, but without personalized settings.

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jfb
It's coming.

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NEPatriot
They also have trending channels (click on the tv icon near the play button) -
which don't seem to be working for me. When I click nothing happens. Prob an
MVP thing.

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zaius
Channels should be working. You should get a box to the left of the player
with a list. They're grabbed from the trending topics on twitter. I'll look
into it.

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arihant
There is a glitch though. I paused a video and when I resumed it started
playing a totally different video, the video I paused is not even in the clip
history.

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FreeRadical
This is possibly one of the best sites ever made.

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rajatmehta1
have you seen www.yawtv.com , its similar but there you can fire a search and
play the videos i.e to say if you search for 'lady gaga' or 'michael jackson'
you can play all the songs present on youtube non stop and instantly.

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benmathes
I think people are missing the thumbs up/down. This is more like pandora for
videos.

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screeley
I just lost another 15 minutes of my life to NowMov. So addicting.

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c00p3r
Time to announce the strategic switch to HTML5. =)

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TotlolRon
<http://www.upl8.tv/>

circa 2008.

