Viber now lets users send video messages and adds six in-chat commands, known as Chat Extensions, to search Wikipedia, Giphy, TheMovieDB, and more
On the heels of Kik and Facebook's Messenger adding in new video features yesterday, one of their old rivals Viber is announcing a new video tool of its own …
Context & Ripple Effects
Viber spent 2016 rebuilding its base: an April push into end-to-end encryption and hidden chats answered the privacy wave, and this release answers the feature war instead — arriving one day after Kik's six-person video calling and alongside Facebook Messenger's own video additions.
The more strategic half is Chat Extensions: six typed commands that pull results from Wikipedia, Giphy, and TheMovieDB directly into the thread. That is the same in-chat-services logic Viber doubled down on months later by acquiring the maker of its ShopChat shopping keyboard, making today's launch an early marker of its platform ambitions.
First-order effects
- Viber users can now record and send video messages and run in-chat searches without leaving the conversation, closing the immediate feature gap with Kik and Facebook Messenger's video launches.
- Wikipedia, Giphy, and TheMovieDB gain a new distribution surface: their content is surfaced inside Viber threads via commands rather than through a browser or standalone app.
Second-order effects
- Rival messengers face pressure to match the command pattern, since extensions keep engagement inside the chat rather than ceding discovery to external apps and search engines.
- For Viber, the extension framework becomes the delivery mechanism for its own monetization — the path that led to folding ShopChat's commerce keyboard into the app under Chatter Commerce's CEO.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, messaging apps consolidate from communication pipes into service layers where search, media, and eventually transactions happen inside the thread — a structure Viber extended further with Communities' moderator monetization in 2018.
- Content providers like Wikipedia and Giphy become dependent on chat-platform integrations for reach, shifting bargaining power toward whichever messenger controls the command interface.
The trend: Messaging apps are turning the chat window itself into a service layer, absorbing media capture and third-party search that previously lived in separate apps.