YouTube Co-founder To Launch Possible YouTube Rival
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley told an audience at SXSW he’ll be announcing a new video product that, “gives flexibility for people to work together and create content.”
Digg founder Kevin Rose, who now works for Google, was moderating the talk and asked Hurley if the new product will compete with YouTube. He said, “We’re not setting up to kill it now. There’s always going to be a place for YouTube.”
Hurley founded YouTube with fellow PayPal employees, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005 with an initial investment of $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital. It was purchased by Google the following year for $1.65 billion in stock. The founders were under fire with threats of copyright-infringement lawsuits. Chad continued to work at YouTube until 2010.
After leaving Google, Hurley company AVOS launched Zeen. It’s a way to make beautifully designed digital magazines or miniature digital books that can be shared online the same way YouTube videos are shared. A Zeen can be posted to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or a blog.
The Zeen creation tool allows users to easily add videos, words, articles, and maps and may shed light on what Hurley is working on with his new video site. Since it is designed for collaborative video creation, it makes sense that the new tool will do for video what Zeen does for publication.
Interviewed by The Next Web, Hurley said to expect a lot more opportunities in the online video space:
“We’re playing with the idea of creating a sandbox that gives us the ability to think of an idea, get it up and running quickly and not have to deal with the frustration of starting again from zero. That’s going to give us the ability to not only innovate and work on Delicious but to continue to use the same learnings and technology to build more services.”
If Hurley’s new video venture empowers users to create more professional and beautiful Web video, it is more likely to complement YouTube than compete with it.
