Paris (AFP)

YouTube announced in a statement Monday the deployment in more than 100 countries, including France, of its new YouTube Shorts format, which allows users of the Google platform to create and publish ultra-short videos, à la TikTok.

Announced last year, this feature was launched several months ago in beta.

Users all over the world can since watch the "Shorts", videos of 60 seconds maximum, but the tool for creating and publishing these videos (which allows in particular to add text and sound or visual effects) is not available. not yet available everywhere.

After India last year and then the United States in March, more than twenty countries have had access to it since June (United Kingdom, Canada and Latin America).

And on July 14, it will be offered in all countries of the "EMEA" zone (Europe, Middle East and Africa), still in beta, the Google subsidiary told AFP.

The platform is taking advantage of this ongoing global deployment to enrich this new pillar of its strategy.

Now the creators of Shorts can use audio clips from YouTube videos.

This will facilitate the production of certain potentially viral videos, such as those in which we react to other content shared on YouTube or in which we apply a recipe or a tutorial.

At the same time, other new features aim to facilitate and encourage viewing of Shorts, which already exceed 6.5 billion daily views, according to the video-sharing network.

Finally, the group announces that its support fund for creators of short videos, endowed with 100 million dollars for 2021 and 2022, and already in place in India and the United States, "will be launched soon for the rest of the world".

If the specialists see in Shorts a response from YouTube to the insolent success of TikTok, acclaimed by young people, the Google subsidiary underlines for its part that it is a "natural" development of its offer, linked to the improvement of video technologies on mobiles.

Instagram, whose parent company is Facebook, also took to short video formats with Reels, which debuted last summer.

© 2021 AFP