For several months we have been hearing rumors of a new video app by the founders of online video mega giant and internet game changer YouTube. Today it has finally been launched, and we have been introduced to MixBit.
Unlike YouTube, which is primarily for sharing and viewing videos, MixBit is about creation. With the app you are able to record, edit, combine and share video clips that are as short as a second long, or as much as a full hour long. You simple create multiple clips and combine them into a longer format, which can include as many as 256 clips per hour long video.
Remixing tools will also be available. You can take content from anything that has been released onto the site and add it in.
According to Chad Hurley, who developed the app with co-founder Steve Chen, the whole point is to share and recreate content using what is already being shared on the site. They wanted to make something that allows for easy storytelling using an insular world of clips.
” It means inventing new ways to encourage and enable people to collaborate with each other,” he went on to say.
This is definitely a unique app. It is all about using other people’s clips to create something new to tell your own story. Then you can shoot your own footage that others can use, or that you can remix into what you find in their database. It pushes the idea of community that is a major part of the social web as we see it today.
But what is a bit weird is that, even with the sense of community this is supposed to foster, they have made it impossible to comment on videos created. There is also no way to tell exactly who uploaded what, because there are no account names or primary profiles. Everything is entirely anonymous.
Maybe that is a smart move. YouTube has become as much a business as a place of sharing, and openness is definitely not a part of its format since Google purchased it. Brands have more power than individual users do, which doesn’t seem to be a concept the original founders of the site intended.
Having a communal database of clips that can be edited freely as a public domain service to create something new is interesting and creative. It will also avoid the sticky copyright issues and corporate superiority of their former project.
So far MixBit is available or the iOS, and will be released on Android in the coming weeks.
Source: MixBit
