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YouTube Shorts mimics many of TikTok’s most popular features. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
YouTube Shorts mimics many of TikTok’s most popular features. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

YouTube Shorts launches in India after Delhi TikTok ban

This article is more than 3 years old

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 videogame 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.

More on this story

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