YouTube Shorts, a competition from TikTok, is coming to 100 other countries

The service was first introduced last year in India, as we reported in the September Youtube Shorts article: Google launches TikTok competition in India. Later it got to the USA and now, according to information from the Theverge portal, it is coming to other countries as well.

According to Engadget, it is said to be up to 100 countries, it has already appeared on some of our editorial smartphones. If the feature appears on your device, let us know in the comments.

YouTube is launching short videos similar to TikTok, so far only in the US

1.3.2021

Chinese social service TikTok With its original concept, it achieved a rocketing increase in users, which did not escape the attention of much older social services. Several have even introduced their alternatives. According to the portal XDA-developers now service YouTube officially launches a similar function YouTube Shorts. So far only in the USA.

The rocketing popularity of TikToku and the designation as a security threat

The TikTok mobile application was created by the Chinese company ByteDance in 2016. The application allows users to create short video clips of up to 15 seconds in length and short videos in the range of 3 to 60 seconds. The user can add music, filters or various effects to the video. The essence of such a video is to captivate other users of the service with something imaginative in a few seconds.

While most of the videos revolve around half-naked dancing girls or travel footage, some also have sports, art and educational content. Because videos are very short, it doesn’t take as long to watch them as classic video blogs. This is one of the reasons for the huge increase in popularity of this service. Its application has been downloaded by more than a billion people in the Google Play store so far.

A year ago, the US service was identified as a security threat by former President Donald Trump. It has previously been identified as a security threat and even banned by India. Because it was threatened in the US with a similar fate as Huawei and was even banned from the US market in the fall, ByteDance decided to resolve the issue by compromise. She sold part of the company to a foreign owner who will control a version of the service for the US market.

Competition from YouTube in the US is already in a stable version

Problems with the US government have further kicked off competing services, which have long been preparing their own counterpart to TikTok. For example, Facebook has long come up with its own alternatives, such as Instagram Reels. Google is now officially launching YouTube Shorts on YouTube. It was announced last year, but was only available in beta. First only India, later also for users in the USA and for some time it can also be seen in the application by Slovak users.

The principle of the function is the same as when creating a video on TikTok. You can record a 15-second video and add music from more than 100,000 artists. Google boasts that YouTube Shorts videos have 3.5 billion views per day. He is not talking about active users yet. TikTok is actively used by more than a billion people. The stable version of the feature is now officially only available in the US. It is not yet known when it will reach other markets.