YouTube developing TikTok rival, called 'Shorts'

YouTube according to a new report by The Information is working on a new feature that will allow users to make short videos like TikTok. It states that the company is currently developing the feature and will roll it out to users by the end of 2020.

The report states that the feature will be called 'Shorts'. And with it, YouTube is looking to take on TikTok, which has grown multiple folds since inception. It states that the company will launch this new feature as a part of its mobile app, in a similar fashion to how it launched the Stories feature.

These short videos will show up in a special feed, which will feature all the creators that make such content. A major plus point that Google has on its side is that it already has a large catalogue of licensed music, which the creators can use to make videos.

TikTok allows users to make short looping videos of three to 60 seconds, with the 15 seconds point being the most popular. The app was initially made available in China back in 2016 and was introduced worldwide two years after in 2018 after ByteDance acquires musical.ly and merged it with TikTok. Since then the app has seen immense growth, even surpassing the numbers of YouTube in terms of daily active users.

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It will be very interesting to see how YouTube will implement this 'shorts' feature inside of its app. And how it will manage to show users short-form and long-form videos together. The company has not made any public comments as of now, and we don't expect them to say anything about this any soon, considering that it might have just started working on the feature that will be released sometime late in 2020.