YouTube Shorts is now officially out of beta in the US, and rolling out to all creators in the region.
After successfully testing Shorts in India – and then bringing its beta to the US back in March – YouTube is now rolling out the short-form video format to all creators in the United States.
The rollout was announced in YouTube’s latest Creator Insider newsletter, along with several new features.
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Shorts now have a new 60-second limit, letting creators record four times more video than the 15 seconds that the feature started with. Creators can choose whether to limit their Shorts to 15 or 60 seconds before starting to record.
Due to copyright issues, the 15-second limit remains when recording Shorts with music from the YouTube library.
YouTube is also adding automatically-generated captions as an important accessibility feature for people who are hard at hearing or deaf. Creators can also add these manually if they prefer.
Viewers can switch between manual and automatic captions while they watch a video.
In addition to the above, creators can now switch video filters within the Shorts camera on the recording and editing screens. This way, they can use filters to change the way a video looks, and correct it if necessary – right within the app.
Finally, the YouTube mobile app now has a new Shorts tab that appears at the bottom of the app screen, letting users explore more shorts that way. The explore section is not going away – it will now appear at the top of the app screen.
The change makes it easy to find Shorts right at the top of the app’s home feed. They can also be found on creators’ channel pages, of course.