YouTube Shorts which allows users to record, edit and share videos of 60 seconds or less has launched in the United States. Before now, the feature has had a test run in India. The application was launched in the Asian country in September 2020 and its content was viewable internationally but now creative residing in the U.S. will be able to create their own YouTube short videos.
Critics have said that its features are very much like that of the Chinese application, TikTok. Creators on YouTube Shorts according to TechCrunch have access to tools such as stop and start recording short video segments with a tap. They can select the video’s backing music or sound and utilise a small handful of in-app editing features.
Sarah Perez, an app analyser while explaining the features of the new app said, “While YouTube Shorts has a clever tool that lets you select the part of the song you want to use in your video, it’s lacking the more intelligent automatic sound-syncing feature that makes TikTok so accessible for beginners.”
The app that has been dubbed “TikTok Clone”. YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, is in the habit of swatting down upstart competitors by cloning them. ARS Technica reports that YouTube did this in 2015 when it launched YouTube Gaming, a livestream gaming platform to compete with Amazon’s Twitch.tv. The app survived for only four years but the live streaming and chat features caught on with several different communities, and there is still a small live-gaming community on YouTube.
In 2017, YouTube copied Snapchat and created YouTube Stories (originally named “YouTube Reels”), which let channels create short update videos that disappear after seven days. Now it’s targeting TikTok with these one-minute videos. Facebook has cloned TikTok with the recently launched Instagram Reels.