The Silicon Review ^Asia

In a move to expand its user base in India, tech giant Alibaba is trying to compete with ByteDance, Disney and Google by doubling its video market in India. Alibaba recently mentioned that it will be investing $100 million into its social video app, Vmate that is owned by subsidiary UC Web. Launched in 2016, the Vmate has, over the period, has added video download and 3-D face emoji features to expand its use cases.

Alibaba is putting in efforts to grab a share in the social video apps market which it couldn’t do in China and Vmate could be its way to fill the gap in India. Most of the features that ByteDance’s TikTok offers can also be found in Vmate. ByteDance is valued at about $75 billion and has a user base of more than 120 million in the country. Alibaba, as one of the biggest global investors in e-commerce and food-tech markets, has made several major investments in BigBasket, Paytm, Snapdeal and Zomato.There were even rumours about the company saying that it had plans of starting its own video streaming service last year after the acquisition of a majority stake in Chennai-based TicketNew.

The investment by Alibaba Group shows that social video apps are finding much popularity in India.There was a time when the internet consumers in India were very cautious in using their data, but now that has changed as mobile data has become significantly cheaper in the country. Thus, video apps are increasingly receiving huge downloads on Google Play Store.