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Youku Launches a Video Recording App, Wants You to be a Citizen Journalist

China’s biggest video-sharing site, Youku (NYSE:YOKU), has today launched a standalone app for iPhone and Android just for recording and uploading videos. The app is called Youku Paike, and focuses on enabling easier user-generated content that can be shared more quickly on social media such as Weibo. There are a lot of keen amateur videographers among China’s netizens, who aim to capture news or potentially viral vid clips and gain a following by doing so. The idea is that the Youku Paike app makes it easier for anyone to do this. Or you can just use it to film kittens. But it comes with political risks for Youku. In a country where authorities dislike free-flowing information – especially online – the company will be secretly hoping that this doesn’t get used to record protests. Anyway, with now well over 100 million Chinese using 3G on some sort of smartphone, the time is ripe for social media to embrace video, not just user-generated photos and text. We recently looked at the Yi Xia app which does almost the same as Youku’s, as well as the more sophisticated iShehui app which has Instagram-like filters to give your video a makeover. Youku actually added a video-upload feature to its regular app back in October of last year, but the company seems to have decided that it needs to be spun-off into a separate app. As the company’s press release explains, it’s designed “to highlight the social media aspects of video blogging,” and so it comes with the option to sign-in using Sina Weibo for people who don’t fancy signing up for a Youku account.

So, while Youku and its rivals are still spending big bucks getting TV shows and Hollywood movies onto their sites, it’s interesting to see old-fashioned user-generated content getting this social media twist.

Get the Youku Paike app from the Android Market or the Apple App Store.