Google has added a beta version of YouTube Shorts, its new short-form video tab, to its app in Ireland and across Europe, with the update expected to be rolled out to all users over the next two days.
All existing and future YouTube videos that are one minute or less and in a vertical format will be available through Shorts, which YouTube first launched in India in 2020.
Shorts sits within the YouTube app, but effectively separates videos of up to 60 seconds from YouTube’s long-form content. It is widely seen as Google’s bid to appeal to the younger mobile video creators who have flocked to the popular ByteDance-owned app TikTok.
The launch of Shorts, now available in more than 100 countries, also follows attempts by Facebook-owned Instagram to lure the TikTok audience to its platform through video tab Reels.
The Shorts product includes a suite of creation tools popularised on other apps such as a multi-segment camera to string multiple clips together and the ability to sync-record with music.
Users will have the ability to sample audio not only from other Shorts but also from videos all across YouTube, including its extensive music library, while creators of longer-form content can opt out if they don’t want their videos “remixed” by other users.
Barriers to creation
"We really want to lower the barriers to creation and part of that is giving people high-quality inputs because they're much more likely to get to high-quality outputs," said Todd Sherman, global product manager for YouTube Shorts.
“We suspected and we heard feedback from both creators and viewers that they really want to see short-form video separated from long-form video. Having a feed of a bunch of videos that are 15 seconds long along with 15-minute videos sort of doesn’t make sense. We certainly believe that as well,” he said.
While YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels both allow videos of up to a minute, TikTok has recently announced that it will triple the maximum length of videos on its app to three minutes.
