Building YouTube Shorts, a new way to watch & create on YouTube
Sep 14, 2020 – minute read
YouTube has always been a place to be entertained — from your favorite dance trends, like Evolution of Dance, Roller Skate Dances, or the Jerusalema Challenge — to highly replayable short videos, like Charlie Bit My Finger, Good morning yall or even Lockdown Trick Shots. Over the years, YouTube has enabled an entire generation of creators who have shared their voice and found an audience of more than two billion people.
User-generated short videos were born on YouTube starting with our first upload, a short 18-second video called “Me at the zoo.” As technology advances, creators and artists can now take advantage of the incredible power of smartphones to easily create and publish high-quality content wherever they are in the world. And people can be entertained and informed by bite-sized content in the spare minutes of the day.
That’s why we’re excited to announce that we are building YouTube Shorts, a new short-form video experience right on YouTube for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones.
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. This is an early version of the product, but we're releasing it now to bring you — our global community of users, creators and artists — on our journey with us as we build and improve Shorts. We’ll continue to add more features and expand to more countries in the coming months as we learn from you and listen to your feedback. Here are more details on what to expect.
What is Shorts?
Shorts is a new way to express yourself in 15 seconds or less, and our team is focused on building its foundation across three main areas:
Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and we want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts. We’re starting to test just a few new tools for creators and artists with our early beta in India:
A multi-segment camera to string multiple video clips together,
The option to record with music from a large library of songs that will continue to grow,
Speed controls that give you the flexibility to be creative in your performance,
And a timer and countdown to easily record, hands-free.
We also recently rolled-out a prominent new spot for the create icon on Android, starting in India. We'll continue to expand to iOS devices and in more countries soon. You can also expect more creation features in the coming months.
Get discovered: Every month, 2 billion viewers come to YouTube to laugh, learn and connect. Creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and we want to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.
We encourage any mobile creator or artist to start uploading their existing short videos on YouTube today to start getting discovered.
Watch: You may have recently seen a row on the YouTube homepage especially for short videos, and starting today we’re also introducing a new watch experience that lets you easily swipe vertically from one video to the next, plus discover other similar short videos. We're also going to make it even easier to start watching Shorts.
There’s much more to come, and over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue to roll out more creation tools and easier ways to watch short videos on YouTube as we listen to your feedback. If you want to learn more about how to create Shorts, check out our forum post.
Have fun with it and let us know what you think. We can’t wait to see what you do with Shorts and look forward to empowering a new generation of mobile creators and artists on the world's largest video platform.