The war between messengers is a war of attrition.
Skype announced a new feature, Skype Mojis, which allows users to share short clips from movies and TV shows within their chats, in a blog post Tuesday. The company partnered with a variety of major movie studios for clips.
The studios partnered with Skype are: Universal Studios, BBC and Disney — with clips from Dr. Who, Muppets, Despicable Me, Pitch Perfect and others featured.
What's interesting is that Skype is basically doing what the internet has been doing for years with GIFs, but with the blessings of the content creators themselves. GIFs are widely distributed across the web without any royalties going to the production studio that created them.
Facebook's Messenger app already has a host of integrated apps that let users share GIFs amongst each other, including Camoji, Giphy and others.
This is very reflective of the nature of competition between messaging apps. It's quite a task to set one messenger apart from another when they all offer essentially the same service.
Despite Skype's ubiquitousness in video chatting, it has to contend with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple's iMessage, Google's Hangouts, Twitter, LinkedIn and more picture-focused services like Snapchat and Instagram.
Everyone has a messaging app, so it becomes increasingly hard for those apps to stand out on features alone. Small additions, like Skpye Mojis, are designed to be that slight edge that sets one app apart from its competition.
If you want to add Mojis to your Skype, it's as simple as downloading the latest version of the app. Skype promises to add more content in the future.