Zee5 to launch a made-in-India rival to take on TikTok

Zee5, the Indian streaming platform, is going to launch its own user-generated, short video platform to take on TikTok in India. Currently in beta, the official launch for the app is slated for early July.

Designed specifically for India and made here, this app is Zee5’s move to make space for itself in the booming short video app market. The highest number of app downloads for TikTok comes from this country and this goes to indicate exactly how popular short video apps are.

With the current anti-China sentiment, TikTok might be on a slight back foot which makes this an opportune time for a new indigenous app to come up and take its place.

The home-grown app from Zee5, the company says, has been designed keeping Indian cultural nuances in mind. Safety, security and appropriateness will be the main tenets of this app, the company has said.

Zee5 is not new to the app game, it already has the video streaming app for smartphones and smart TVs, thus it should not be making the kind of mistakes the likes of Mitron did which got the latter pulled off the Google Play Store for a while.

Infact, ‘partly indigenous’ Mitron is going to be the Zee5 app’s main rival in this space. 

The infamous Mitron has been created by a bunch of IIT students who bought the code from a Pakistani developer called Qboxus. Google pulled Mitron off the Play Store for violating certain policies, but it was soon allowed to come back in again.