YouTube has launched its own video recording app to compete with Vine and Instagram, going live for web and iOS Thursday and arriving for Android in a few weeks, the New York Times reported.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube's founders, have been teasing the app for months, but finally announced the release of MixBit, a video sharing and editing app.
As the name implies, the app is designed to allow users to mix and piece together videos, or "bits." Like Instagram and Vine, the user holds their finger down on the record button to capture video. While Instagram allows for up to 15 seconds and Vine for six, MixBit allows 16 seconds.
What sets it apart, however, is the ability to piece together "bits," from a user's own or publically uploaded videos on YouTube, for a video up to an hour long.
"The whole purpose of MixBit is to reuse the content within the system," Hurley said in an interview. "I really want to focus on great stories that people can tell."
Video editing is the main attraction for MixBit, as Vine offers no ability to edit and Instagram just introduced very basic editing tools Wednesday. Laura Krajecki, chief consumer officer of the advertising company Starcom MediaVest Group, said MixBit is the first video app to offer users the ability to mix and mash their video clips with others to create a unique composition.
"Create an app that lets people edit it, and that's where people are going to go," she said of the market opportunity in general.
The app currently lacks one major aspect that makes Internet sharing services so successful: ownership. Users cannot post MixBit creations under a name and cannot comment on others' compositions.
"Everyone wants to be recognized," Hurley said, adding that identification features will be on the way eventually.
"We wanted to do that to first build a community within MixBit," he said. "To see how that unfolds will be pretty interesting."
