YouTube’s quick-video answer to TikTok coming to US in March

As YouTube has gotten bigger and more professionalised, many younger people have turned to TikTok to popularise dance crazes and lip-synch video challenges with only their smartphones. — Reuters

YouTube will introduce a short-form video feature called Shorts to the US in March, making its biggest move yet to respond to the growing challenge from TikTok.

Americans will be able to use a preliminary version of Shorts while the company, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, continues developing the feature, YouTube said Wednesday in a blog post. Shorts lets users create and upload 15-second videos, the length of an average video on ByteDance Ltd’s TikTok. YouTube has been testing the feature in India since September, and said the videos are now being watched more than 3.5 billion times a day in the country, which is its largest market.