YouTube Shorts, a competitor to TikTok, launching in the US in March

In the coming weeks, nearly five months after it started testing India’s feature, YouTube will release a beta version of its short video offering, YouTube Shorts, in the United States.

YouTube Shorts, part of the main YouTube app, allows users to make 15-second vertical videos and upload them. It is the response to TikTok and Instagram Reels from the company.

YouTube Shorts would probably help producers directly from YouTube reach their viewers, exploiting an established subscriber base while still residing alongside longer-form content and media. Clearly, with a massive 3.5 billion daily global views for shorter-form content, the Indian beta process for YouTube Shorts has been a success.

Every year, increasing numbers of people come to YouTube to launch their own channel. But we know there’s still a huge amount of people who find the bar for creation too high. That’s why we’re working on Shorts, our new short-form video tool that lets creators and artists shoot snappy videos with nothing but their mobile phones.

Currently, Shorts is available in beta in India. Since the beginning of December, the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled, and the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion daily views globally. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin expanding the beta to the US, unlocking our tools to even more creators so they can get started with Shorts.

Besides this, YouTube will soon automatically start adding video chapters to related videos to allow users to access them easily. Currently, creators need to include chapters manually.