Hike launches Hindi news feed

New Delhi: Bharti and SoftBank joint venture hike messenger, an instant messaging platform, on Monday launched a Hindi news feed in its app after seeing a hit rate of 100 million English news stories per week.

The new feed will allow users to access nuggets of news reports across sports, entertainment, politics, technology and other categories.

"We have carefully studied content consumption patterns of our user base and hike being an Indian app, we are happy that now our users can read news in Hindi.

"Users can switch between Hindi and English news by tapping a button. We believe this is a step forward as we embark on our journey to bring India online in a locally relevant way," said Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder of hike.

Hike, which currently has 1.5 million users subscribed to its English news feed, said it would soon launch news feeds in other local languages which will aid the messaging platform to increase its user base in the country.

Currently, hike has 35 million registered users. Other popular rivals like Whatsapp and Viber have a user base of 900 million and over 40 million, respectively.