Plizy

With so much video content online, navigating among all the options and choices can sometimes be overwhelming. Plizy recognizes this and is providing a solution that may change the way you watch and discover video on the Internet.

"We are a video discovery platform, so everything is cloud-based," explains Jonathan Benassaya, Founder and CEO of Plizy. "We have a cloud with a recommendation engine able to understand, from your video habits and your interests, [how] to create automatic channels tailored to what you do and what you like."

Plizy uses a variety of factors to learn what you like and recommends videos based on that information. "We have a patent pending recommendation engine," says Benassaya, "where we use three kinds of information. [We use] the social graph, obviously, but also we create your interest graph based on your Facebook and your Twitter account. So we try to understand if you like tech, if you like sports, if you like baseball, if you like Asia, etc...and above that, we use some algorithms. The most well known is collaborative filtering, which is the ability to recommend content based on your habits. It's a hybrid recommendation engine, so we don't use only your social graph."

The content that the service provides comes from a large and growing list of providers that Plizy hand picks—both public sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and sites that provide original content, such as Revision3.

"As of today, we have more than 300 channels that we've picked on the web," says Benassaya, "which are the best web content so far. You can enjoy TED, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook at the same place. And we are adding something new in the coming days, which is the ability to download some content, so you will be able to download TED videos [for example] and watch them on the plane or the bus or in a train. So we're trying to push the experience, the discovery, and the access to the best content."

The company is also working on technology that will allow you to push content to just about any device you would use to watch videos. Unlike when using AirPlay, you will be able to continue using your tablet for other things while streaming content. "[The system] is cloud-based," explains Benassaya, "and the cloud can control two screens. That's why you have an entire communication between two screens."

Plizy plans to roll out a wealth of new features over the coming months as it expands from its current iPad app to other devices. "We help people discover the right content," says Benassaya, "because they want to discover things, but they don't have time for that. Plizy is here for this."