Indians spend 50 million minutes every day chatting on WhatsApp video calls

Indians are leading when it comes to spending time on WhatsApp video calls.

"India is the top country for video calling minutes with a total of over 50 million video calling minutes per day," the company said in a statement.

Last year in November 2016, WhatsApp announced the rollout of its WhatsApp video calling feature with more than 1.2 billion monthly active users globally across platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows.

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, WhatsApp.

The report also goes onto say that WhatsApp sees a total of over 340 million video calling minutes per day, globally along with users making over 55 million video calls per day.

WhatsApp in India has currently 200 million monthly active users. The Facebook-owned messaging app is also expected to soon make a foray into digital payment services starting with India and is looking to hire a digital transactions head for the country.

In February, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton had met IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss ways in which the company could contribute to India's vision for digital commerce.

According to a job advertisement on WhatsApp's website, the company is looking for a candidate with technical and financial background, who also has an understanding of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), BHIM payments app and Aadhaar number.

The job responsibilities would include collaboration with banks to resolve WhatsApp user issues and being "an advocate for the users of our digital transactions service to the rest of the company", it added.

When contacted, a WhatsApp spokesperson said the company is keen to understand how it can contribute more to the vision of Digital India.

"We're exploring how we might work with companies that share this vision and continuing to listen closely to feedback from our users," the spokesperson added.

(with agency inputs)