YouTube Co-Founder Planning On Launching Rival Service

A lot of noteworthy news came out of SXSW this year, but under all of the chaos YouTube co-founder Chris Hurley revealed that he's planning on launching a new video streaming and sharing service that could rival YouTube. Hurley says he's about a month away from launching his new platform, and he says the service will "give flexibility for people to work together and create content."

Then again, Hurley notes that he isn't launching the service to kill YouTube. Instead, he's creating a platform that's better suited for collaboration purposes, and says that "there's always going to be a place for YouTube." Indeed, given its large user base, we don't think YouTube will go away anytime soon, no matter how awesome a new video service might be, but while Hurley means no harm to YouTube, we wouldn't be surprised if his new service clashed a little with Google's video powerhouse.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion six-and-a-half years ago, and Hurley stayed on board until 2010 when he stepped down from his role. Since then, he's been working on several projects, including a service called Zeen that lets people "discover and create beautiful magazines." However, it looks like his latest project is this new video service.

Other points of discussion during Hurley's interview session included how YouTube was bought by Google, and how many of the key discussions took place at a Denny's restaurant with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin. He even met with Yahoo a week after his discussion with Google about a possible acquisition, but YouTube ended up going with Google in the long run.

[via Adweek]