While short video sharing apps such as Twitter’s Vine have increasingly won over western fans, Chinese app users have largely limited the majority of their internet communication to static text and images. Tencent’s newest app, Weishi, aims to change this. Similar to Vine, Weishi allows people to share short eight-second videos with their friends, and these clips can be edited with various filters, watermarks and themes.
Chinese Internet firm Tencent is best known for its popular messaging service WeChat, but one of its other products — a Vine-like app that features eight-second videos on loop — has been quietly gathering steam in China. The app, Weishi, which is only available in Chinese for now, chalked up 160 million video views in a single day on Valentine’s Day this year, which also coincided with the Chinese Lantern Festival. Tencent says that “millions” of the video clips were also viewed outside the Weishi app itself, via services such as Weixin (the version of WeChat available in China) and mobile IM platform QQ – testifying to the reach that Tencent has in China with the presence of its social platforms.