Following up from a brief teaser in a Q&A session at SXSW three weeks ago, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has formally announced his new online video venture, dubbed MixBit. The site itself hasn't launched yet, but the timing for the reveal is no coincidence given Google's 8-year contest to find the world's best video is supposedly ending today with the shutdown of YouTube – one of the company's traditional April Fools pranks.
MixBit's current landing page lets users enter their email address to be notified of the actual launch, while poking fun at a Google April Fools' joke with a message that reads: "YouTube is shutting down. Instead of sitting around, we thought you'd want a new site to not only watch cat videos, but create them... together!"
For what it's worth, The Verge did some digging around and was able to find some cached test pages from MixBit including one with a looping mp4 video featuring YouTube co-founders Hurley and Steve Chen.
Chad Hurley along with co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim sold YouTube to Google roughly six years ago in a deal valued at $1.65 billion. All three remained onboard after the acquisition, with Hurley serving as CEO until October 2010 and sticking around in an advisory role for a while after that.