TikTok is about to get some stiff competition: Google LLC-owned YouTube announced today that it will release “Shorts” in the U.S. in the coming weeks.

“Every year, increasing numbers of people come to YouTube to launch their own channel,” the company said in blog post that listed a slew of YouTube updates. “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.”

Google failed to mention that this has been done before with some success but did add that Shorts is currently available only in beta testing in India. Over there the number of Shorts’ channels has tripled since December, according to Google, with YouTube’s Shorts player now getting 3.5 billion views a day around the world. Not surprisingly, entering the U.S. market is the next step.

Shorts is indeed pretty much a mirror image of TikTok. In April last year as TikTok was exploding in popularity, Google announced that it was working on its own mobile-first video app. It took until September for it to hit India. It’s very likely that Shorts will see a similar rise given YouTube’s immense popularity and the fact that it has an incredibly large catalog of music for users.

Google isn’t the only company to copy the Chinese short video app. Around the time that Google launched Short in India, Facebook-owned Instagram launched Reels. It too is similar to TikTok in that it allows users to create short-form videos. The app is currently available to people in over 50 countries, including the U.S., although it doesn’t seem to have upset TikTok’s apple cart.

The short video format is no doubt the spring that several U.S. tech companies want to tap, but it won’t be easy to put a dent in TikTok’s ascendancy. It has more than 700 million monthly active users and is installed on 89 million U.S. smartphones. Still, given YouTube’s incredible popularity, TikTok will certainly be challenged.

Photo: YouTube