YouTube announces TikTok competitor in India, where TikTok is banned
YouTube on Monday unveiled Shorts, a short-form video feature that’s aiming to directly compete with TikTok. 
YouTube said it will launch an early beta of Shorts in India over the next few days, before expanding to other countries.
India is a good place for YouTube to launch Shorts. The country banned Chinese-owned TikTok and 58 other apps in June when it said that the apps were “engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India.” Before the ban, roughly 30% of TikTok’s 2 billion downloads came from India, according to Sensor Tower.
Instagram, which launched its TikTok clone Reels in August, told CNBC last week it’s already seeing rapid user growth in India. YouTube’s announcement means Facebook’s Instagram faces a new competitor for users.
Short-form video platform launched following India’s ban on Chinese-owned app
Google is taking advantage of India’s ban on TikTok by launching its own short-form video platform, YouTube Shorts, in the country, the company has announced.
The new feature will mimic many of TikTok’s most popular features, allowing users to make and post 15-second videos with built-in creative tools encouraging them to add licensed music and more.
“Music for these videos will be available through in-product music picker feature. The picker currently has 100,000s of tracks, and we’re working with music artists, labels, and publishers to make more of their content available to continue expanding our catalogue,” YouTube said.
YouTube Shorts won’t, yet, exist as a standalone app. Instead, the service is being bundled into the main YouTube app for Indian users, where it will appear with a prominent “create” button.
Google’s attempt to steal users from TikTok comes after Facebook tried the same, launching a new feature, Reels, built into Instagram. Like Shorts, Reels does not yet have a standalone app but is heavily promoted in the main Instagram app.
Neither US company has yet tried to clone TikTok’s algorithmic “For You” feed, however, instead preferring to rely on their own discovery tools for pushing content out to users.
The renewed competition comes as TikTok faces geopolitical pressure due to its Chinese ownership. In India, the government banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, in July, in response to a border skirmish in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas.
That ban, which also took in WeChat, escalated further this month when another 118 Chinese apps, including the video game PUBG Mobile, were banned.
Even before the ban, TikTok had a rocky past in India. It was the company’s largest foreign market, with an estimated 120 million users, but had faced a number of bans over fears that it was a corrupting influence on the country’s youth, as well as viral stunts which were linked to deaths as people tried to recreate them.
A similar ban proposed in the US looks to have been averted thanks to a last-minute deal between TikTok and Oracle, founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, which will involve the US database company running a small portion of TikTok’s operations in the country.
Shorts will be part of the YouTube app. It looks like TikTok, with an option to add music, change the speed of the video and more. But video length is capped at just 15 seconds. TikTok videos can be up to a minute long.
Shorts is only available for Android phones right now, but YouTube said it will expand to iPhone and to other countries soon.
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