Viber Announces Video-calling Desktop App

A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of Viber, a multi platform mobile application that allows for free calls on mobile phones. The company has just announced that they have reached 200 million subscribers. To celebrate this remarkable milestone, the company has completely updated the mobile app user interface and have also announced a desktop video calling version of the app. Viber desktop is currently available on both the windows and Mac platforms, with the Linux version expected to be released in the up coming weeks.

At the present time, the video messaging space is greatly dominated by Skype and Google — However in an interview with the Wallstreet journal, Viber CEO Talmon Marco emphasized that Viber is not afraid to compete with the likes of google, Skype and other video messaging platform given their growth in recent months. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how they plan to position themselves in this space.

Perhaps, one differentiating factor by Viber desktop is that, unlike most video calling apps,  Viber allows the seamless porting of phone calls or texting started on the Viber mobile app immediately through to your desktop or laptop computer to continue with the same phone call and texting or vice versa. Google does this with texting on gtalk, but not with video calls, and it is also  exclusively limited to the Android platform. Yet, Viber provides the above mentioned feature on all the current leading platforms (i.e Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry 10).

Below is a brief video that explains how Viber Desktop works. You can download Viber for desktop/Laptop here, ( i have just downloaded the mac version), but as expected with a new piece of software, a few minor bugs should be experienced with the app at the moment.