Nowmov: A StumbleUpon for real-time video

The real-time web is a hyperactive, fragmented place, and lurkers who want to now what’s happening now have to search through myriad services and filters. Y Combinator-backed Nowmov wants to help the energy-challenged masses stay informed by bringing the real-time web to couch potatoes — in video form.

The company, which will launch soon, takes the most popular videos of the moment and serves them to viewers. Visitors to nowmov.com, are immediately given a video to watch based on an algorithm that weighs retweets, real-time YouTube views, and other social metrics. Over time, the service will personalize the videos it serves based on a user’s Twitter stream, usage on the site, and other info from his social graph.

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The founders say they want to make the experience as much like TV as possible. If you aren’t interested in the video you’re watching, you can skip and find another, as though changing the channel, and then surf back to the previous if you change your mind. The idea is similar to Joost and Hulu, but for video content that doesn’t come with nasty license and copyright issues attached.

Personalized media discovery is not new — there are many StumbleUpons me-toos out there — but limiting it to video, emphasizing real-time popularity, and recreating the TV experience could prove sticky. On the other hand, watching video that hasn’t passed the test of (even a few minutes) time can only be so interesting.

The founding team includes James Black, the principle video engineer of the iTunes video store and Thomas Pun, the engineering manager of Apple’s H.264 codec.

The company founders say they have iPhone, Android and iPad apps on the way.

[Image: Nowmov founders David Kelso, James Black and Thomas Pun at the Y Combinator Demo Day today, photographed by JP Manninen]