YouTube wants to challenge Tik Tok on its own field and could launch in the coming months a section dedicated exclusively to Shorts videos. Here’s how they will be
Google is also trying to stem the TikTok phenomenon and grab at least part of its billion users, all very young. According to reports from the online newspaper The Information, in fact, YouTube is about to launch a new section called “Shorts” just to compete with the Chinese social network.
The rumors do not speak of a stand-alone app but of a feed dedicated to short videos, within the YouTube app. YouTube’s big advantage over TikTok’s other would-be competitors is the infinite music library, to which YouTube already owns the playback rights, which can be used as a background for Shorts videos. Moreover, compared to TikTok, YouTube boasts a greater credibility and transparency that should keep it safe from the heavy controversies that have accompanied the impetuous development of the Chinese app. According to The Information YouTube Shorts will arrive by the end of 2020, but the exact date is not yet known.
YouTube Shorts: how it will be
The information collected and published by The Information seems to be confirmed by some lines of code in the latest versions of the YouTube app, and published by Xda Developers, in which you can find some strings referring to “Shorts”. From these strings it seems that it will be possible to choose the video playback speed between “Normal” (1X), “Fast” (2X) and “Slow” (0.5X). The background music, as already mentioned, will be chosen by the user from the extensive catalog of YouTube Music. It is not clear what will be the maximum duration of a Short video, nor if there will be rankings dedicated to this type of content. If there are, then YouTube risks becoming two apps in one, generating no small amount of confusion.
TikTok, continued growth
While everyone is trying to counter TikTok, the growth of the Chinese social dedicated to the very young seems to never stop. Launched in 2016 in China, TikTok was initially called Musical.ly but after its acquisition by Bytedance, it changed its name and, in 2018, the international version was released and the app began to circulate worldwide among hundreds of millions of users. By the end of 2019, there were an estimated one billion actual users of TikTok.