Messaging app Kik adds the ability to video call with up to six people
Khari Johnson / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
December 20, 2016 was a crowded day in group video chat: Kik shipped six-person calling on the very day Facebook Messenger launched its own six-user split-screen group video chat, while Viber pushed video messages and Chat Extensions the same afternoon. For a mid-size messenger like Kik, matching the giants' feature cadence was the price of staying relevant.
The arc that followed is instructive: Kik doubled down with a reported $60-$80M acquisition of video chat maker Rounds weeks later, yet the corpus shows the app was ultimately shut down after its SEC battle over the ~$100M Kin token sale, with headcount cut to 19.
First-order effects
- Kik users gain native six-person video calling, closing an immediate feature gap opened the same day by Messenger's group video chat debut.
- Kik now competes head-to-head on video with far larger rivals — Messenger, Viber, and later Snapchat and Instagram — all shipping group video within roughly two years of this launch.
Second-order effects
- Feature parity alone proved insufficient: Kik spent $60-$80M acquiring Rounds and its 35-person team to build a real video engineering base in Tel Aviv rather than keep building in-house.
- The spending deepened Kik's exposure when the SEC dispute over its 2017 token sale forced a $5M settlement, a headcount reduction to 19, and eventually the shutdown of the messaging app itself.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to consolidation pressure in standalone messaging: matching platform giants' video features required acquisitions, and regulatory and financial shocks finished what the feature race started — leaving group video as territory dominated by apps attached to larger ecosystems.
- For smaller messengers, the lesson embedded in this coverage is that feature velocity without a durable business model is a losing position, however well-timed the launch.
The trend: Group video chat became table stakes across messaging apps in the late 2010s, but the arms race favored platforms with ecosystem backing over independent messengers like Kik.