There was the time when Facebook was the de facto leader of social media networks, and YouTube was the leader in online video streaming.
Fast forward, things don't look too good for those two giants. With shorter video formats becoming increasingly popular, thanks to TikTok, Meta that owns Facebook and Instagram, tries to become more like TikTok.
The same goes to YouTube.
YouTube has what it calls 'YouTube Shorts', an approach that makes it embrace short-form videos better.
Knowing that Short videos are indeed popular, and that there are too many YouTube videos that are long, the streaming giant is adding a feature that makes it easier for creators who wish to create Shorts from their existing content.
The tool that is called the 'Edit Into a Short'.
The tool allows users to select up to 60 seconds from the longer videos they own, and then clip them into Shorts.
In other words, using the Edit Into a Short tool is like clipping small pieces together after extracting them from longer-duration videos.
After a Shorts is created, the feature then allows users to add text, filters, and even add video shots from the Shorts camera or from the photo library.
Then, the newly-created clip will directly link to the video where the clip originally came from.
This is where YouTube is improving things a bit, in which it knows that its library of long-form videos is immensely vast.
Unlike TikTok which focuses only on short-form videos, YouTube is making Shorts the more ideal way of promoting creator's longer content.
Shorts' ability to promote longer videos is expected, especially when Google is still experimenting on how to monetize YouTube Shorts.
However, it's worth noting that Edit Into a Short cannot be used for user uploads. Instead, the tool can only work on videos that are already uploaded.
What this means, Edit Into a Short tool cannot work with new content.
While the feature may not be able to replace the traditional video editing software to create Shorts, Edit Into a Short tool would certainly encourage creators to look back into what they have, to see if they have content that works well with Shorts.
YouTube Shorts was introduced back in 2020, as a way to convert videos into a vertical orientation, with length that is no longer than 60 seconds.
With more than 1.5 billion people watching Shorts every single month, YouTube knows that investment is worth the effort.
However, Edit Into a Short tool is proof of how worried Google is about its competition against TikTok.
Knowing that TikTok is still way more popular that Shorts, YouTube has been putting an immense focus on improving the feature.
Google certainly knows that it would take much more than just this tool to keep up with TikTok. But still, this is showing that Google is not going to give up and will continue improvising.
With the tool, Google is making YouTube to be able to grow its Shorts library at a fast and organic pace.
The Edit Into a Short tool has been made available to the YouTube app on both iOS and Android.
Before this, YouTube was already converting vertical videos smaller than 60 seconds into Shorts.