Buried among a weekend of panel discussions, product launches and parties at SXSW is the news that YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley is on the brink of jumping back into the Web video space with a new service.
Six and a half years after Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in a move that, while questioned at the time, has proved to be an astute piece of business, Hurley says he’s a month away from launching a platform to complement YouTube which is specifically for content collaborations.
It sounds interesting — so long as we’re not talking MC Hammer meets Psy-style collaborations — particularly when considering the aforementioned Korean singer earned more than $8 million in YouTube royalties alone for his ‘Gangnam Style’ hit. That’s in no small part to the many imitations which it took a cut of ad revenue from.
Alas, all we know so far are the words that AdWeek caught in Austin:
“I wish [South by Southwest] was a month later because I could unveil the new product,” Hurley said during a Q&A with Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose on Saturday afternoon. Without going into too much detail, he said the product is “primarily video-based…and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content.”
We’ve seen stealth launches from Hurley before of course. Last April he teased details of Zeen, a service to “discover and create beautiful magazines”, which launched in beta in July.
It seems likely that the new product will be launched out of AVOS, the Google Ventures-backed company that Hurley set up with fellow YouTube founder Steve Chen. In addition to Zeen, AVOS also owns Delicious, which it bought from Yahoo in 2011, and Mei.fm, a Chinese version of Delicious that launched in April 2012.
Related: YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley talks Delicious, acquisitions and his push into China
Hat tip Gizmodo
Headline image via Joi / Flickr
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