Video-Sharing Platform MixBit Debuts

Officially crowding the video snippet-sharing marketplace, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen unveiled MixBit on Thursday. The YouTube co-founders are relying on some novel editing tools to set their new service apart from Vine and similar offerings.

While MixBit limits the length of video that can be captured to 16 seconds, users can combine up to 256 clips into hour-long videos. Analysts on Thursday suggested that MixBit will likely appeal to a niche audience, but questioned its broader appeal.

“The ability to take video of the moment and combine it [with] other material to craft a larger story should appeal to aspiring filmmakers, but, of course, that's a significantly smaller subset of online video sharers,” said Susan Bidel, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

That said, “MixBit is taking mobile video production to the next level,” Bidel added.

Hurley stated that MixBit was designed for a broad audience: MixBit is “a community of creators: people who want to record and share pieces of their lives and the things they love … or just hanging out with friends and family … as well as filmmakers, citizen journalists and everyone in between,” he explained. “MixBit is also for people who enjoy playing with video in order to create something new and unexpected. And of course—MixBit is for people who like cat videos.”

Niche or not, MixBit will be competing against Vine -- which Twitter acquired last year for a reported $30 million -- and Facebook’s bitty video service. Built into Instagram -- which Facebook bought last year for $1 billion -- the social giant debuted its short-video service earlier this summer.

While their efforts remain experimental, marketers appear to be embracing short-form video services.

Quick-service restaurateur Jack in the Box, for instance, just launched a summer campaign using Vine, along with other social platforms. With the help of digital agency-of-record Struck, the burger brand produced 101 videos, which instruct customers on how to "Go Big" -- particularly when ordering their meals.

Compared to the 16 seconds of video that MixBit enables users to capture, Facebook's service allows users to record 15 seconds of footage, while Vine limits recordings to 6 seconds.

MixBit is not the only service that offers video editing tools. This summer, Vine added several video-making tools, including a layout grid overlay, selective focus, and a “ghosting” tool designed to add some precision and range to the creation process.

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