WeChat, China's top instant messaging app made by Tencent that includes a slew of local services, launched a short-video feature in early February dubbed Channels (视频号 in Chinese).

Located in the social media feed called WeChat Moment, under the app's "Discover' tab, users can explore top-trending videos from celebrities, vloggers, craftsman, etc. Short videos are "looping", or automatically played after the last one finished, reminiscent of the popular short video app Douyin, made by Tencent's major rival ByteDance. Only notable difference between the two apps is that WeChat Channels limit video length to 25 seconds while Douyin allows up to 5 minutes for most users and 15 minutes for a limited number of beta testers.

The new feature was first announced by Allen Xiaolong Zhang, a prominent Tencent executive known as the "father of WeChat", during the 2020 WeChat Open Course conference in early January. 

"WeChat has missed the boat on the explosion of short video content over the past few years,” said Zhang. He stated that WeChat Official Accounts, the company's text-based content publishing platform, was positioned as a connector between brands and their subscribers and aimed at pushing the latest information to its readers, but only used articles as the only message types and lacked support of videos.

"Not everyone is interested in writing articles. Some users prefer to post images or short videos," said Zhang said, adding that "My original intention is to offer a platform where everyone is able to create content."

Tencent, by itself and through WeChat, made numerous attempts in the short video sector prior. One of them was WeSee (微视), a mobile video streaming app that included short video features launched in 2013, years earlier than the now dominant Douyin and Kwai (快手). 

In early 2019, the social media giant added another short video feature named Time Capsules that appears in WeChat Moments and only exist for 24 hours before automatically deleted, reminiscent of Snapchat's and Instagram's Story feature.

Besides WeSee and Time Capsules, Tencent launched at least 12 other similar services and apps. However, all of them failed to woo enough users despite its massive push with the help of WeChat, a prime product with a billion users.

Douyin and Kwai, the two top short-video apps, grew exponentially and attracted hundreds of millions of users within only 5 years. Douyin announced its daily active users surpassed 400 million as of January 7, 2020, while Kwai had over 300 million daily users in its latest report.

Video content on Channels are mainly news and information, knowledge and life hacks, compared to humorous, fashionable and story-telling styles on Douyin and Kwai. Entertaining content on Channels, despite being the few, gets more interactions, including likes and comments, than other videos.

Videos on Channels also seem to have the ability to be bundled with articles on the WeChat Official Account platform, as a few of these videos includes links to an article that includes the videos the content creators posted on their Official Accounts.

When a WeChat user’s friend liked a video, the video will appear on the user’s feed as well. This is by far the clearest indication of Channels' content recommendation mechanism.

The connection from creators' short videos to articles is a way to bring viewers to their Official Accounts. This resulted in the fact that Channels look more like a way to bring traffic onto WeChat's existing dominant Official Account platform.

Meanwhile, Douyin and Kwai have established themselves over the past few years that resulted in both having a vibrant ecosystem of creators and viewers. It will still take more time for Channels to continuously generate high-quality short videos.