YouTube founders are back with MixBit; a potential Instagram killer

9 Aug 2013

Pictured: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of MixBit

YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are back in the start-up game with a new video-sharing app called MixBit that could drive inroads into the market currently dominated by Instagram and Vine.

However, unlike the other apps that capture single sequences of video, MixBit enables users to mix, edit and stitch together videos.

MixBit videos are also a second longer at 16 seconds compared with Instagram and Vine’s 15 second durations respectively.

The app – available for both iOS and very soon for Android devices – launches with a sister website MixBit.com that allows users to edit up to 256 clips into a one hour-long video, turning ordinary consumers into movie directors in their own right.

As well as sharing with the MixBit community final film can then be blasted out into the social networking world via Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

“The MixBit website is a community of creators. We believe everyone has something interesting to say,” the founders say on their website.

“We give people fun, intuitive tools to help them tell stories together. We think video should be a living, breathing entity and that creativity is a collaborative process. More than simply capturing brief moments in time, we help people bring stories to life.”

Chen and Hurley along with Jawed Karim started YouTube in 2005 while they were employees of PayPal when they had sparked on the realization that sharing videos from a dinner party was difficult at the time. A year later in 2006 Google acquired the company for US$1.65bn.

mixbit editor

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com