One of YouTube’s original founders is set to launch a potential competitor (or perhaps cooperator?) to the online video behemoth. Chad Hurley, who exited the company after selling it to Google in 2010, is planning to launch a new video collaboration platform.  

"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 Kevin Rose at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas, as reported by AdWeek.

He did say, however, the new service will be "primarily video-based...and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content."

Collaboration and crowdsourcing will figure prominently in the new service, he said. But the platform is likely to act somewhat as a complement to YouTube, rather than an adversary.

“We're not setting up to [kill YouTube]—now…There’s always going to be a place for YouTube."  

It may be time for some fresh thinking in online video: According to the latest comScore Video Metrix round-up, online viewing of videos and attendant ads are starting to decline slightly. In January, nearly 180 million U.S. Internet users watched 36.2 billion online content videos as well as 9.1 billion ad views.

But that’s a decline from the month before, when 182 million users watched 38.7 billion online content videos and 11.3 billion ad views.

Overall, 83.5 percent of the audience viewed online video – down 1.4 percentage points month-on-month.

Google Sites, driven primarily by YouTube, dominated the market with 150 million unique viewers and 12.3 billion video content views, and had the highest average engagement among the top 10 properties.

On the ad side of things, though, Google took the top spot but fell below the two billion mark to 1.8 billion ads.