YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has plans to launch a collaborative online video startup within the next month, he announced at South by Southwest over the weekend. The new service will allow people to work together to create content. This is a clear sign of the direction of video distribution, suggests Wired. It demonstrates how video networks are becoming increasingly more like social networks.

“Hurley’s launch comes as his prior startup YouTube itself becomes more collaborative under owner Google,” writes Wired. “YouTube this past fall opened a 41,000-square foot studio in a former Los Angeles aircraft hangar, where amateur video producers can work with one another and use professional-grade equipment. YouTube is also working to make its comment section more socially sophisticated, with more real names and higher-quality feedback.”

And there are other clues that social video is taking off, as well. Design software company Autodesk acquired mobile video startup Socialcam last summer for $60 million and Amazon has about 45 projects in line at Amazon Studios, “its 2-year-old effort at crowdsourced interactive filmmaking,” notes the article.

“That’s not to say that every rising online video brand has bet on social,” it adds. “Netflix and Hulu, for example, have both invested heavily in polished, Hollywood-style content and offer only a minimal set of social features. Viddy, a Los Angeles-area startup, has struggled in its efforts to fuse content from mass media stars like Justin Bieber with social platforms like Facebook.”

Even so, YouTube appears to be playing a more crucial role in the nation’s discourse, writes Wired.  It is a “seedbed for potent political appeals, the hinge of effective Kickstarter fundraising campaigns, and fodder for much of the sharing that goes on within networks like Facebook and BuzzFeed. And there’s both poetry and logic in the notion that Hurley, having helped democratize television with YouTube, is now trying to turn the medium into a truly two-way affair.”