Looking at the Silicon Valley startup space I noticed two semi-competitors in the multimedia field: MeeVee and Azureus.

MeeVee (www.meevee.com)is a 1+ year old startup. As of this writing they deal primarily with TV listing timetables, much like a TV Guide or GuideStar. The twist here is they have a Tivo-like feature whereby users save favorite shows and subjects and the website returns a list of recommended TV shows that the user might like. MeeVee is branching this content recommendation system into the multimedia space. MeeVee also advertises a MeeVCast software download that taps into a peer-to-peer network to download video clips automatically. It sounds like a broadband video version of Pointcast to me. I'm slightly wary of the spyware-spambot possibilities of this plugin.

Azureus (www.getazureus.com) is a startup built off the success of the popular open source BitTorrent client of the same name. Using a web browser integrated into the next version of the client, they want people to poke around a user community that will also shop a multimedia store component like iTunes. Leveraging the large P2P client user base, they want to distribute large high-quality videos to people. Azureus also will have a ratings and rankings system for user content. The (possibly advantageous) twist here is that they want content providers such as independent filmmakers to upload and sell their videos on Azureus, with a small commission charged.

The competition here is within the content recommendation systems and the overall user base. MeeVee, as far as I know, has a negligible user base for this MeeVcast product but the TV listings are pretty good. Azureus has several million users of the client but the content is lacking. I would like to see a melding of these two spaces somehow.