YouTube rolls TikTok rival in India, says will test in more countries in coming months

AFP: Taking advantage of the ban imposed on TikTok by India owing to rising tensions with China, YouTube has decided to launch a rival of the short video application, stating that it will release it in other countries in the coming future.

YouTube Shorts made its debut as TikTok pursues a partnership with Oracle that it hopes will spare it from being shut-down in the US by President Donald Trump.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday confirmed a bid from Oracle concerning TikTok´s American operations after the video-sharing app´s parent ByteDance rejected a proposal from Microsoft.

But it remained unclear whether the venture would pass muster with Washington regulators.

“Shorts is a new short-form video experience for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones,” YouTube vice president of product management Chris Jaffe said in a blog.

“Over the next few days in India, we´re launching an early beta of Shorts with a handful of new creation tools to test this out.”

YouTube Shorts videos are limited to 15 seconds, according to the Google-owned platform used by some 2 billion people worldwide.

Jaffe noted that Shorts will be modified based on user feedback before being made more broadly available.
TikTok´s brand of brief, quirky videos made on users´ cellphones has grown hugely popular.

But Trump´s claims that TikTok could be used by China to track US federal employees, build dossiers for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage has sparked a diplomatic storm between Washington and Beijing.

TikTok has rejected the charges and sued over the crackdown, contending that the US order was a misuse of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act because the platform is not “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”

Trump effectively ordered the sale of the Chinese company´s US operations by September 20, after which the app would shut down.