YouTube Founders Launch New Video-Sharing App MixBit

The masterminds behind YouTube are at it again with a new mobile app for creating and sharing videos, dubbed MixBit.

Released for iOS on Thursday, MixBit differs from apps like Instagram and Twitter's Vine by letting you create and share longer videos, and use content filmed by other users as part of your own creations. With MixBit, you can record, edit, and publish video as short as one second up to one hour, right from your iPhone, according to the App Store description. In comparison, Instagram allows 15-second videos, while the looping Vine videos can be up to six-seconds max.

Here's how it works—MixBit videos can be taken in multiple clips, or "bits," as long as 16 seconds each. A single video can include as many as 256 clips, which are stored as independent elements but stitched together and played as one video.

MixBit aims to make video-editing easy, letting you drag and drop clips to rearrange them into the order you prefer. You can also cut or delete clips, as well as save and publish your finished product from your iPhone.

All of that might sound pretty standard, but here's where things get interesting—in addition to filming your own clips, you can edit and include any publicly shared video content as part of your own movie. This means, you can essentially create videos with MixBit without having to shoot any original content, or remix your own content with other people's video.

MixBit is the first major product to emerge from Avos, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup launched in 2011 by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

"We have always been passionate about video. We started YouTube to make it easy for everyone to share videos. Now we want to help people make great videos," the duo wrote in the App Store description of MixBit.

Hurley and Chen maintained that "we think video should be a living, breathing entity and that creativity is a collaborative process."

If you're an Android user, don't worry—you won't be left out for too long. According to a report from The New York Times, MixBit is set to be released for Android "in several weeks."

For now, iOS users can grab MixBit in the App Store for free.

Meanwhile, in more news on the video-sharing front, Instagram on Wednesday updated its mobile apps to version 4.1, giving you the ability to import video from your phone's library, instead of having to film it inside the app.

For more, see PCMag's full review of MixBit.