On Thursday, Kim Dotcom’s controversial Mega storage locker for online content announced the launch of a new communications platform dubbed ‘MegaChat,’ which has been designed to challenge Skype and other similar services.

The new MegaChat communications platform – which was announced in 2014; but it launch was delayed until now - essentially gives the users the ability to engage in end-to-end encrypted video and audio communication.

In the end-to-encryption system of the new MegaChat service, a packet - be it a message or a file – travels through the Internet only after it has been encrypted on the sender's side. The packet remains encrypted on the way, and it gets decrypted only when it lands on the receiver's end.

Since MegaChat is a Web-based communications platform, it requires the users to sign up for an account. Once the users have signed up, they can log in to their account through the browser; and click the ‘Conversations’ icon on the Mega site to place ‘free’ calls.

Even though Mega launched the MegaChat service as recently as Thursday, January 22, Mega founder Kim Dotcom is already touting the early success of the new communications platform. According to Dotcom’s claims, the new MegaChat platform tallied nearly 500,000 calls "within just a few hours" of its launch.