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September 4, 2007

MyStrands Launches Music Video Discovery Service, MyStrands.tv

Mark Hendrickson

18 comments »

MyStrands, provider of a music recommendation service, has launched a slick new website at MyStrands.tv for finding music videos hosted on YouTube.

Users can browse music videos by artist or genre and play them in a large player. The system also recommends videos based on your viewing habits and input.

A social network of sorts is integrated into the service. You can view friends’ favorite videos and artists and set up your own personalized channels. There is also a stumbling feature in which you can view another video based on the artist of the video you are currently watching.

Similar music video discovery services include Middio, MOG, and iLike. Of course, you can always just browse music videos on YouTube itself, many of them legal.

It certainly makes sense to build services that exploit the music videos hosted on YouTube, as the majority of the top 10 videos on YouTube are music-related.

MyStrands recently raised $25 million in Series B funding.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:42 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. mystrands.tv at pixelblog

    September 14th, 2007 at 4:39 am

  2. MyStrands Completes B Round, $55 Million Raised To Date

    December 3rd, 2007 at 8:06 pm

Comments

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  1. David Litsky

    September 4th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    Cool product but $25MM in funding? Where is all this money going?

  2. Frank Gruber

    September 4th, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    Saw that one coming - wonder what it will be recommending next? :)

  3. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    September 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    Go Oregon companies! Site looks good, I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to come from this crew.

  4. Will@eckerd

    September 4th, 2007 at 1:51 pm

    Mystrands is cool, but we have been using Vidora.tv to do the same all summer. they have much more features including video search, picture in picture videos, their own browser etc etc… And they are right here out of Eckerd College.

  5. Dave

    September 4th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    Yea, I have to say im a Vidoradict (vidora-adict) lol. Great site / system and I think it blows all the others out of the water.

  6. James Gardiner

    September 4th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    Vidora.tv and the site mentioned above.
    Why have they not been closed down by some type of legal bodies.
    These sites, if any, appear to me, to break copyright law.
    MyStrands.tv, may be leverage of content on youtube, but its still offering a service to solicit illegal content..
    Vidora.tv is even worse. Its easy to see they have been uploading Music Videos into there database themselves.

    I am quite amazed at this blatant abuse.

    I personally do not see a future for these sites if hey are based in a country with any respect in copyright.

    James

  7. Fred Destin

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    dont understand why you dont dig deeper into this one. ilike is quite basic profiling stuff from what i can see, whereas mystrands appears to be based on some pretty solid math innovation — does not mean the service is better, but certainly a much more intriguing IP base and probably broader application fields.

  8. Rod

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:13 pm

    I agree with dave, my friend introduced me to vidora and I havent stopped using it since: the features within vidora offer a greater level of versatily than what I can see in mystrandtv. I’m just loving it.

  9. Fred Destin

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    in fact check this out: http://labs.mystrands.com/index.html#papers

  10. Bye bye Videohybrid

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    Relax james, times are changing…copyright is dead. That vidora site is the best video site so far. They wont have anything to worry about, Youtube, Hulu, Joost or one of the others will definately buy them out just for their system and programmers. Their site is on a totally different level when compared to the others in the market. Their downloaded player rocks too. Even better than Veoh. they just got it right. Stop trying to be Mr. Lawyer guy and enjoy the free music. Btw, their Vlog system is the easiest i have seen.

    Go Vidora
    btw any browser codes out there? Cant wait to see that.

  11. G

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    Expected much better from MyStrands than just indexing YouTube Videos. With everything they claim to have for recommendation technology, and all the money they have raised - they want develop business models indexing YouTube videos - someone at MyStrands is trying to figure out their Nth iteration of their business model to justify the money raise!

  12. Will@eckerd

    September 4th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

    looks like I started an avalanche of Mystrands and Vidora haters. If you dont like free music, stay away. Vidora in my opinion is the better site. i use it together with pandora and last.fm for hours at a time. I agree it will not be around too much longer, but not because of copyrights , but because it will be bought out. I agree with the other guy above. i want to see the vidora.tv system in googles hands with all their content. it would be a perfect match.

  13. Fabian Schonholz

    September 4th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

    Recommendation systems are highly specialized search engines. In any case, I talked to them a while back and they have a cool product. Their technology is also kind of cool.

  14. James Gardiner

    September 5th, 2007 at 5:13 am

    Guys, anyone who thinks that a decent company is going to purchase a site that exists on pirated content known nothing of business. Gootube has enough problems with legal issues and they do not offer tools like these.

    vidora is nothing special. Good use of Flex technology, but nothing to hard to implement from a developer perspective.

    I do not debate the real issue of it being very easy to download pirate music/video on the net. However, I do not support companies abusing this to make profit, and i am sure the lawyers will get around to doing something about it.
    And if your fine with pirating, go for it, while you can. Just don’t expect sites like this to stay around.

    James

  15. LonelyBloggers

    September 5th, 2007 at 9:51 am

    What happened? Did all of the Vidora employees come over and spam this post ? Brutal…..

    I agree with James, all these sites do is index illegal copyrighted material.

    I did a few searches and all I came up with were illegal uploads etc …

    There’s no business model involved here beyond leveraging people looking for copyrighted material… Yawn…

    Infact this whole vertical is completely boring…. There will be a hundred sites that will do this type of thing a year from now…

    You better hope that you get bought out, because you’ll be out of business sooner than later. Nothing personal, but really both of these sites (and associated businesses) are going nowhere fast.

  16. injuredlist

    September 5th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    There’s a completely legal, AJAX-y and non-Youtube powered version of this at http://videovalve.tv

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