YouTube Founders Hurley And Chen Have Released An Asian Clone Of Vine
AVOS Systems, the company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has just launched a new app that appears to be a Chinese version of Twitter's popular six-second video-sharing app, Vine.
Context & Ripple Effects
Vine had passed 13 million users while expanding to Android, extending Twitter's short-form video format across another major mobile platform. Twitter was also signing advertising deals with Starcom and WPP, making audience attention across its products more commercially consequential.
AVOS Systems, founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, enters that mobile-video contest with an app explicitly positioned around Vine's format for an Asian audience. The move matters because it tests whether a rapidly spreading social-video behavior can be reproduced by a separate operator rather than contained within Twitter's network.
First-order effects
- AVOS Systems becomes a direct short-form video entrant, offering the users it targets an alternative built around Vine-like sharing.
- Twitter and Vine face a new app positioned to compete for short-video viewing and creation in the Asian market AVOS is targeting.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's advertising partnerships increase the value of sustaining engagement across its platform, so Vine's mobile growth is more than a product metric as copycat services seek similar user attention.
- YouTube founders Hurley and Chen are applying their video-platform credibility to mobile social video, raising the competitive pressure on incumbents to pair simple creation tools with distribution.
Third-order effects
- The launch points to short-form mobile video becoming a contested product category in which the format can travel across platforms and regions, rather than remaining exclusive to the network that popularized it.
- If mobile usage continues to pull video consumption toward handheld devices, platform advantage will depend on capturing creator and viewer attention before advertising relationships can be translated into revenue.
The trend: Short-form video is emerging as a mobile-first social format that attracts both established networks and independent platform builders.