By Jonathan Easton
YouTube’s TikTok clone has begun its global rollout.
YouTube Shorts effectively serves as YouTube’s competitor to TikTok, giving users the ability to publish and promote short-form video content.
The service launched first in India last year, and expanded to 26 countries including the US and the UK earlier this year. While YouTube Shorts is still in beta, the Google-owned video platform said that it will now roll out to “more than 100 countries around the world where YouTube is available.”
Viewers had previously been able to watch shorts across the world, but only users in a limited number of countries were able to create and edit Shorts using YouTube’s tools.
Similar to TikTok, YouTube users can clip content from videos already available on the platform while also linking back to videos on a main channel. Users are able to opt-out from this feature however, providing some form of protection against abuse.
