Startup Idea #106: Third part comment system for videos

Taylor Davidson has a useful post on the revenue strategy of Nico Nico Douga, which involves giving its community the ability to interact with each other via embedded comments and links with a video.

















What is interesting about Nico Nico Douga is not the technology. Video annotation has been around (see veeple). Rather, it is the understanding that in social media, conversations are key. They have also show that it is possible to build a business if you give people the ability to converse, to personalise their conversations and to integrate the conversations around social objects.

What we are seeing now for sites such as Youtube is that the comments are not fully integrated into the media. It does not match the velocity that the video medium is capable of. Is it then possible to build a third party comment system for videos, similar to what companies such Disqus have done for blogs? An open system where any video can be embedded into and start enjoying the type of commenting system Nico Nico Douga has.

I wonder if the commenting system will be more useful if we throw in some Zemanta-like recommendation service that recommends the right kind of product image (that has an affiliate fees attached) for embedding into the videos. For example, a fashion video site will have fashionn product images, a car video site will have car parts, a anime video site will have figurines, CDs et al.

What I have outline above is a very rough attempt in exploring business models around the concept of conversations and new forms of referrals. This is such an exciting area to be innovating it and I look forward to any examples, feedback et al you might have.

Posted in: community