Recommendation Ventures, the company behind social music and video recommendations service Scouta has signed a new deal with EPG provider IceTV to provide intuitive content recommendations to IceTV users.

The new service, IceTV Recommendations will be provided to IceTV users as part of the IceTV EPG service. The service allows users to receive personalized suggestions and an opportunity to discover and record new TV shows. Suggested TV shows are displayed as an IceTV Recommendation using a separate icon within the IceTV electronic program guide, allowing IceTV users to easily locate and then select them for more information. From there users can set the recommended TV show to remotely record onto their compatible digital
recording device at home within a few clicks.

We mentioned Scouta’s move into white label recommendation provision back in March. The company has had some success with its core Scouta TV offering, but now sees its core business opportunities going forward as a backend recommendation engine provider for other sites.

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The winner was Perth, Western Australia based Scouta, a media recommendations service we’ve featured a couple of times on TechCrunch. The judges felt that although not without competition, Scouta’s recommendations across video as well as music offered something unique. Scouta has also moved into white-label service provision, offering a solid business plan that is already starting to see results.

Second placed was Good Barry, a service we covered in October 2007. GoodBarry’s GoodBusiness is an easy to use hosted eCommerce platform.

Third was a Google Mashup I frequently use myself: SuburbView. We’ve not covered it before on TechCrunch, and although it’s not the prettiest mashup, its ability to pull data from Australia’s leading real estate sites and break down that information into finite detail, from number of bedrooms, price, suburb, and even building type make it a practical service that is ripe for takeover.

A full list of the results can be found on the VS Consulting blog here. Judges comments are available here; it doesn’t take too much guessing as to which my comments were

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Scouta releases today a Windows client for generating video and audio recommendations based on the podcasts and videocasts in a user’s iTunes collection. This release comes just over a month after the company released a Mac version to do pretty much the same thing.

To use the client, all you have to do is install and configure it with your Scouta user account and set the frequency at which you want it to sync with your iTunes collection. Be sure to have some podcasts in iTunes before trying this out; otherwise it’s pretty pointless (it won’t recommend content based on your music collection alone).

The client will also only create recommendations using the podcasts and videocasts you’ve actually listened to or watched. Once recommendations are generated, users can tweak them by manually rating content in the Scouta web interface.

If you only casually consume podcasts, Scouta may be overkill and not worth the time to set up (even though the process is pretty dead simple). Personally, I discover enough online content through emails from friends and by simply browsing sites like YouTube and the iTunes catalog. But, if you love discovering new content online, this client could come in very handy.

MOG, iLike, and Last.fm also provide content recommendation systems that integrate with iTunes, except they focus on music and not general media.

The screenshot below provides a view of the Scouta recommendation interface.

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The data is fetched via TurboGears and uses the GFX library to create the visual effects.

ICCARUS was launched Wednesday at Webjam Perth and won first place from a field of around 15 demonstrating startups. I spoke with Scouta CEO Richard Giles at the WA Web Awards Friday and he told me that the feedback on ICCARUS had been strong. Scouta plans on further refining ICCARUS with a possibility of providing the service to the public either later this year or early 2008.

The screencast above doesn’t do the service full justice, but it’s enough to give some idea of what it is capable of.

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Scouta launched in February with a service that recommends audio and video content to members based on personal content preferences.

The new agent allows Scouta to base recommendations on a member’s iTunes library, including podcasts and video podcast subscriptions. Recommendations are then automatically provided within iTunes to be played locally or uploaded to attached devices.

Scouta has also launched a site redesign and new site features to coincide with the launch.

Scouta plans to include movie, music video, and television show recommendations in future releases.

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The issue differs from a similar dispute covered at TechDirt. Where as the legality of the content on YouTube was in question in that case, in Scouta’s situation the video was legally uploaded to YouTube by the rights holder, with full rights given for the video to be embedded in 3rd party sites.

The stupidity of companies such as Web Sheriff apparently has no bounds with the DMCA notice sent to Scouta (pdf) failing to comply with the act.

Web Sheriff failed to demonstrate where the original content could be viewed as required in a DMCA notice; simply they couldn’t demonstrate the source of the original content to demonstrate infringement because Scouta was showing the original content as legally uploaded by the rights holder. The notice demands that Scouta “Remove [the] Infringed Title(s) from Infringing File Location” despite Scouta not hosting the file (YouTube does). The act is clear that such notices should only be sent to those hosting infringing files; if the content did infringe the act (and it clearly doesn’t), then YouTube should have received the notice.

The abuse of the DMCA by companies like Web Sheriff highlights the abject failure of the law. Startups such as Scouta and others should not have to be subjected to erroneous claims such as this one. There is an urgent need for America’s legislators to dump the DMCA into the realms of history where it rightly belongs.

For those who enjoy the White Stripes: the video in question, Compliments of Warner Music and Google/ YouTube.

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Scouta is a new service that has recently launched that recommends audio and video content to members of the site based on content that they are interested in. Scouta has indexed content across a wide variety of sites to allow users to find and receive content from any of these sites rather than searching on each individual site. This means that it has a large catalog that is a superset of the big libraries and directories.

They are announcing today that in a few weeks time, they will have a Mac iTunes client that will allow users to directly view or listen to their recommendations or your own bookmarked content. The plugin will also track what you listen to and watch in iTunes and send that information back to Scouta. This is similar to iLike except that it works across all content from both iTunes and Scouta itself (where you can track content on a large number of video and content sites). They will also open up an API so that others can develop tools or integrate Scouta and its recommendations.

Most ’starting points’ on content sites such as YouTube show the most popular videos, or the highest rated videos, from all users. While you can sometimes break these stats down by region (in YouTube you still can’t – resulting in a large number of foreign-language (well, foreign to English speakers) now dominating the main content pages), more often than not you are looking at content that generally doesn’t match what each individual may be interested in.

Scouta will track media that you have bookmarked, as well as media your friends have bookmarked along with any groups that you are part of and use that information to show you recommended content. From our initial tests, it seems to work well and we found interesting links pretty quickly. Scouta provide a bookmarklet so that you can bookmark content into Scouta without going back to your page. They also provide RSS feeds for almost everything on the site (it is interesting to have your recommendations delivered to you in your news aggregator)

Scouta was founded in Perth, Australia and is privately funded.

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