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Google is taking advantage of India’s TikTok ban by launching its own short-form video platform, YouTube Shorts, in the country, the company 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 that encourage them to add licensed music and more.
“Music for these videos will be available through the music selection feature on the product. The selector currently has 100,000 tracks, and we are working with music artists, labels and publishers to make more of their content available to continue expanding our catalog, ”YouTube said.
YouTube Shorts will not yet exist as a standalone app. Instead, the service is included in YouTube’s main application for Indian users, where it will appear with a prominent “create” button.
Google’s attempt to steal TikTok users comes after Facebook tried the same, launching a new feature, Reels, built into Instagram. Like Shorts, Reels doesn’t have a standalone app yet, but it gets heavily promoted on the main Instagram app.
However, none of the US companies have tried to clone TikTok’s algorithmic “For You” feed, instead preferring to rely on their own discovery tools to deliver content 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 included WeChat, was further intensified this month when 118 other Chinese apps were banned, including the PUBG Mobile video game.
Even before the ban, TikTok had a difficult past in India. It was the company’s largest foreign market, with an estimated 120 million users, but it had faced a series of bans for fear of it being a corrupting influence on the country’s youth, as well as viral gimmicks that were linked to deaths when people tried to recreate. they.
A similar proposed ban in the US appears to have been avoided thanks to a last-minute deal between TikTok and Oracle, founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, that will involve the US database company that manages a small part. of TikTok operations in the United States.
