Sina Weibo Launches Short Video App Miaopai and Announces 500 Million Users

Sina Weibo partnered up with Miaopai, a short-video app which Sina Weibo invested in (report in Chinese). Miaopai is a Vine-like short video sharing app, which enables users to shoot up to ten seconds of video, and then edit or add frames to the video before sharing to friends. The service, which ensures real-time synching, is embedded in 4.0 version of Sina Weibo.

To promote the service, Sina Weibo invited hundreds of celebrities to use Miaopai since its launch in August this year. In addition, the company planned to invest 10 million yuan ($1.64 million) next year to encourage UGC.

Sina Weibo claimed that Miaopai is not traffic-demanding, because the video clip it generated is very short. It needs up to 600K of traffic to upload a video, equivalent to the traffic needed by four pictures. Moreover, the development of 4G network will further ease users’ concerns on traffic problems.

According to latest data released by the company, Sina Weibo recorded more than 500 million registered users, of which 76.5% are mobile users. There are more than 570,000 third-party developers on Sina Weibo platform and over 60,000 have established cooperation with the company, covering the fields of film, travelling, shopping and music (report in Chinese).

Compared with foreign short video services like Vine, Keek and Instagram, domestic ones are still in a preliminary development stage. But more and more companies start to explore this sector, such as Tencent’s WeShow, Xiaoying, Papaqi and WeiCo+.