MixBit

» see mixbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2013 the two people who built YouTube tried to do it again, smaller. i did not notice at the time, and it turned out almost nobody else did either. MixBit launched on 8 August 2013 from AVOS Systems, the incubator Chad Hurley and Steve Chen ran after they sold YouTube and left. The phone came first, the Android version followed in October.

The idea was that video should be something you edit, not just something you post. You shot clips of up to sixteen seconds each, then stitched and reordered them into a longer piece that could run as long as an hour. Anyone could watch without an account, and anyone could take your clips and build something new on top of them. On paper it was a real answer to the question of what remix culture would look like on a phone.

The timing was the problem. MixBit arrived in the same stretch of 2013 when Vine had the six-second loop and Instagram had just bolted video onto the app everyone already opened. A remix tool with a learning curve had to fight for attention against two apps that asked for none. It never got the crowd it needed, and a remix product with no crowd has nothing to remix.

~ the case file ~

~ what it became ~

When the consumer app did not take, MixBit quietly turned into something else. It repositioned as a hosting and embedding service for businesses that wanted video on their sites without handing it to YouTube. That kept the lights on for a few years, far from the culture-shifting thing the launch coverage had imagined. The app was pulled and the service closed on 21 August 2018.

~ the distance ~

I have no personal memory of MixBit, and i think that is the honest fact of it. It had no real footprint in Turkey and not much of one anywhere. Short video in my part of the world was still a thing you watched more than made in those years, and when the making did arrive it came through other apps. MixBit is less a thing i missed than a thing that never quite happened, which is its own kind of grave. Two founders with the best possible resume and one clean idea, and the market had already moved on before they finished building it.

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