What about monetizing the recommendations themselves like some other commenters suggest. Would you pay for high quality recommendations?

No the idea is to just make the recommendation platform. There is no hosting going on. If though someone decides to self-host at least they'll be discoverable through the recommendation platform.

The goal is not necessarily to make self hosting easier. The goal is that if you're able to self-host than you could benefit from this recommendation platform by being discoverable. It's your hassle to be viewable the recommendation platform doesn't host anything.

What if instead we had the recommendations from the main sites YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and if you want your personal video hosting site to be recommended you would fill in a form to add you sites to the collection of sites the recommendation system crawl through?

This might be helpful to avoid bad quality recommendations?

This is exactly my idea!

But how would you make enough money to support a popular service? Will youtube allow you to place ads next to the videos on your site? The users would still receive the pre/mid/post roll ads.

I'm thinking of first targeting a very specific niche of content and making a recommendation client out of that. If the recommendations are really top notch than maybe people interested in that niche would be wiling to pay to get them (This is what another commenter suggested).

That's the core problem with such ideas: Blekko, metacafe et al have tried it. It's getting people to pay for this service that seemed an impossible hurdle to cross.

Google video search does not recommend. You must make a search query. I'm talking about actual recommendations that you didn't explicitly search for which is where discoverability stems from.

So you intend to collect detailed view data to feed your model? Kind of like a browser extension spying on every video you watch anywhere, collecting detailed data about how you watch, etc? Don't count me in.

I'm thinking more about a website (Client) where you get the recommendations then if you click on one of the recommended videos (either by watching the embed or redirecting from the website) we'll assume that you liked it.

Outside of this website (client) you won't be tracked.