Plizy offers a Pandora-like service for videos

Plizy is a new video recommendation app and service that uses a social algorithm to find videos you'll like. It mines what you and your friends do on social networks and yields, CEO Jonathan Benassaya says, near-perfect personalized playlists delivered directly to users on the Plizy iPad app. The app launched last week.

Think of Plizy as Pandora for videos, Benassaya says.

Plizy uses public APIs from DailyMotion, YouTube, and Vimeo to display ad-supported videos from those sites. Plizy also has an exclusive deal with Revision 3, from which it gets a better revenue split. Benassaya also wants to hook up Plizy with companies like Hulu and Netflix to get their shows on the Plizy platform.

The Plizy algorithm looks at your social network to see what your friends watch. It also analyzes your interests by reading your Twitter stream and it uses a collaborative filtering tool to figure out what new content you might enjoy. The idea, is to make Plizy as good at recommending videos from around the Web as Netflix is at recommending studio movies and TV shows. That way Plizy can take users who have similar tastes (but who you don't know) and use their preferences to push certain videos to you, so you can discover new videos.

Currently, Plizy is in a private beta: users can sign up through Plizy.com. For now, users can share with friends and push out invites to their social networks. In the future, it will be available on other platforms, including intelligent TVs, smartphones, and tablets.

Plizy isn't the only company in this space. Magma is another dashboard into Internet TV. Redux offers a FriendFeed-like service for video. ShowYou and Boxee aggregate video based on social networks. Recently, Yahoo snagged IntoNow to get into social TV. Plizy fits in by going beyond aggregating content and actually predicting programming you'll enjoy and providing a platform that's easy on the eyes.

Whether or not Plizy satisfies your tastes is another matter. You may not like merging your TV habit with your social networks. But if you do, services like Plizy have a chance of improving your viewing experiences. It found good videos for me, and the next time I have time to kill and want to do it with video, I'll probably fire up Plizy.