Hike Messenger launches video calling feature for users

NEW DELHI: With an aim to build for a largely “sight and sound” country that is India, Hike Messenger, India’s only home grown and second largest messaging platform, has launched video calling feature for its users.

Video calling, the beta of which was rolled out in September this year to a select set of less than a hundred thousand , will now begin to rollout to the entire userbase starting with Android users this week.

The evolution of communication on Hike: Hike continues to be loved by its users for its chat experience with its 10,000+ hyper-localized stickers in 40+ languages. Hike also launched one-on-one and group (100 member) audio calls in September 2015. Introduction of video calls one year later, today, makes for an even better friction-free, sight and sound communication experience.

Commenting on the launch, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger said “This was an obvious one and we’re excited to bring it to the market so quickly. We’ve been in beta for a few months and the results have been really positive. We’re now excited to roll this out across our entire userbase. We see India as primarily a sight and sound market -- and we believe video calling will have a large impact on how people communicate inside of Hike.”

In January 2016, Hike had announced that it has over 100 million users. 95% of Hike users are based in India and 90% of them are young and below the age of 30. Hike users, on an average, exchange 40 billion messages per month and spend 120 min. per user per week on the platform. Hike has been built for these young consumers around 4 key pillars: