YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley used an April Fools’ joke to promote his upcoming new product, a video-focused site called MixBit (via the Verge) that emphasizes collaborative video creation, rather than trying to compete with YouTube for a viewing audience. Very little has been revealed about MixBit as of yet, beyond the landing page which allows people to sign up for notifications about its upcoming launch, but in an SXSW Q&A Hurley revealed some information.
In that session, hosted by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, Hurley suggested that MixBit (then left unnamed) would be a platform more targeted at creating video with others than YouTube, and that the product would be able to be unveiled “about a month later,” which translates to early April.
As far as creator-focused video platforms go, there’s already Vimeo, which distinguishes itself from YouTube based on its appeal to video professionals who focus on quality, vs. the more broad clip offerings available on YouTube. Mobile products like Vyclone have also sprung up that emphasize collaborative video creation, enabling users to work together with strangers to gather video from a variety of sources simultaneously and mix it together automatically to provide easy creation of crowdsourced concert supercuts, for example.
We’ve contacted MixBit to find out more about the startup, but given its pedigree, it should provide an interesting take on the collaborative video space no matter what the particulars.