And when I say "franchise" I mostly mean that I'd like to work on a revenue sharing basis with folks who are in the niche that I'm targeting. Again, my reference here is the success that had iHanuman due to Tilak Pyle.

I can imagine that cooking might be a niche that would work. My mom watches a lot of cooking shows. I could imagine her following certain cooks that had videos to sell. But before I would go after the cooking segment, I would find a cook with these attributes:

has some videos to sell

is charming

is ambitious

believes in the idea of the site

If I could not find a cook with those 4 attributes, then I would not go into the cooking niche. I'd look at some other niche instead (skiing? tennis? fishing? hunting?).

I do regard this whole idea as more a marketing play than a technology play. Nowadays, web technologies are so mature, the tech side of this would be relatively trivial, compared to the marketing side of things.

I am surprised that chrischen is "only looking for technical founders". I really think the tech will be (relatively) easy. The marketing will be hard, especially in 2010.