With over 50 million video calling minutes per day, India has become the top country for video calling via WhatsApp — a feature that was launched from India in November last year and rolled out globally to other countries.
Video calling on WhatsApp has the potential to support data revenue growth of telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Reliance Communications and Reliance Jio Infocomm.
Over 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger every month globally to stay in touch with the people and businesses that matter to them the most.
Social media network Facebook has added group video calling — preloaded with stickers, masks, frames, effects and the ability to share photos and videos to your Day.
Microsoft in February launched Skype Lite, an app to provide seamless experience in messaging, audio and video calling even at lower bandwidths. Packed in a 13MB file, the new app is available only for Android devices and is especially designed to save data.
Communication app Truecaller in March tied up with Google to integrate the tech giant’s video calling app Duo within the Truecaller app.
WhatsApp video calling
According to the data provided by the Facebook-owned popular mobile messaging app on Monday, a total of over 340 million video calling minutes are being recorded per day globally and users are making over 55 million video calls per day.
WhatsApp currently has 200 million monthly active users in India.
In November last year, WhatsApp announced the rollout of the video calling feature, enabling more than 1.2 billion monthly active users globally to make video calls across Android, iPhone and Windows devices.
The global launch event was attended by Neeraj Arora, head of Business, WhatsApp and Manpreet Singh, product lead, WhatsApp, in New Delhi.
“We are constantly working to improve WhatsApp and expanding the boundaries with focus on quality and we do not look at the competition,” Arora had told reporters.
WhatsApp is available in more than 50 different languages around the world and in 10 Indian languages.
With the video calling feature, WhatsApp is now competing with Microsoft-owned Skype and Google’s Duo.
“Video calling is one of the most requested features from people in India. We’re proud to have the opportunity to launch this feature in India and look forward to seeing people use WhatsApp to talk to their friends and loved ones face to face,” said Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp started with messaging and Group Chat six years back and then added voice calling.
