YouTube Founders Launch MixBit Video App to Rival Vine and Instagram Chad Hurley and Steve Chen unveil their newest video creation, an app that allows users to edit video on their smartphones.

By Catherine Clifford

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

MixBit
YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley (left) and Steve Chen.

Thanks to the proliferation of video cameras on mobile devices, we are all citizen photojournalists. With the launch of MixBit, we can all be citizen video editors, too.

Launched by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the new video application for your mobile phone is positioned to rival six-second video app Vine and Instagram's new video capacity, which allows users to record up to 15 seconds of video at a time.

With the MixBit software app, a user can record video clips up to 16 seconds long, and then edit as many as 256 video clips into one single presentation, according to the description on Apple's iTunes store. The entire editing process can be done on your mobile phone. Users can also use content uploaded to the site by the community. At the bottom of this article, there is a sample video made with the app.

To fund the development of the app, AVOS, the company behind MixBit, raised venture capital money in April last year from Google Ventures, the China-based incubator Innovation Works, Madrone Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Exactly how the app will make money is not clear yet. "The focus is on creating a product and service that people love," MixBit says.

Related: Apple's App Store Turns 5: A Look Back at the Most-Popular Business Apps

The app is free and now available for Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It is expected to be available on Android devices in the next few weeks.

"We started YouTube to democratize video distribution. Now, we are democratizing video creation," said Chad Hurley, co-founder of San Mateo, Calif.-based AVOS, in a statement. "Video is the most interesting and engaging way to share an idea with others. We want to remove barriers to video creation, while encouraging and enabling open collaboration."

Hurley and Chen founded YouTube in 2005 and sold it to Google for $1.65 billion in stock in 2006. Today, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, according to AVOS.

Related: How to Make the Most of YouTube's New Redesign

Catherine Clifford

Senior Entrepreneurship Writer at CNBC

Catherine Clifford is senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC. She was formerly a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com, the small business reporter at CNNMoney and an assistant in the New York bureau for CNN. Clifford attended Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can follow her on Twitter at @CatClifford.

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