YouTube Shorts Will Launch in March to Compete With TikTok

YouTube is hoping to give TikTok a little competition with the introduction of YouTube Shorts, a new short-form video tool allowing users to "shoot snappy videos with nothing but their mobile phones." A beta version of the new creative tool is set to launch in the United States this March, chief product officer Neal Mohan announced in a blog post Wednesday.

"Every year, increasing numbers of people come to YouTube to launch their own channel," Mohan wrote in the post. "But we know there's still a huge amount of people who find the bar for creation too high. That's why we're working on Shorts, our new short-form video tool that lets creators and artists shoot snappy videos with nothing but their mobile phones."

Shorts is currently in beta in India, where, according to Mohan, the tool has already grabbed plenty of success. In the post, Mohan said, "the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled" since the beginning of December 2020. He added that "the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion daily views globally." As a result, YouTube is planning to roll the Shorts beta to the U.S. "in the coming weeks." Mohan said doing so would unlock "our tools to even more creators so they can get started with Shorts."

Shorts had first been teased in September 2020 when Chris Jaffe, VP of Product Management, wrote in a blog post, "As technology advances, creators and artists can now take advantage of the incredible power of smartphones to easily create and publish high-quality content wherever they are in the world. And people can be entertained and informed by bite-sized content in the spare minutes of the day." Announcing Shorts, Jaffe described the tool as "a new short-form video experience right on YouTube for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones."

This is not the first short-form video for YouTube, with Jaffe having noted that user-generated videos were first born on YouTube in 2005 with the upload of a short 18-second video called "Me at the zoo." However, Shorts will allow for a new and more seamless creative experience. The move follows similar moves by other platforms to compete, with Twitter having launched "Fleets" to compete with Snapchat Stories.

Shorts will be just one of many initiatives in 2021, with Mohan on Wednesday also previewing a new add-on package featuring 4K resolution, offline viewing and unlimited concurrent streams for YouTube TV. YouTube will also move to add video chapters to relevant videos. After launching YouTube Kids last year, the platform will offer new parental tools to help parents create a safer online environment for their children.