A Russian news website T Journal has claimed that Instagram is currently testing the live video feature called ‘Go Insta’ for some users on the beta Android app in Russia. The new feature has been added in ‘Stories’ section, and for these users, the feature appears at the top of the page with a red tag that reads ‘LIVE’. A user has to click a red button that says ‘Go Insta’ to commence a broadcast.
Ilya Grishin, a reader of T Journal, who was running the latest beta of the Instagram Android app on his Nexus 6P, accidentally found one such story marked with a unique “LIVE” badge. When he pressed on it, he was taken to a page of popular live broadcasts and then hit an error wall.
T Journal, in its report, displays several photos of a user interface for recording a story, with one bearing a “Go Insta” button. A “Schedule” option can also be seen at the top.
Earlier this year, Facebook launched its live video feature globally, and since then it is working to push the service with its full capacity. It appears that the social network now wants to bring the feature to Instagram.
A couple of months back, Instagram had launched a Snapchat-like ‘Stories’ feature allowing users to create a single video from multiple images and small video clips and then share the clip with friends. The video disappears after 24 hours of sharing.
A story can be uploaded on Instagram by tapping on the plus icon on the top left corner of the screen. Users can also open the camera by sliding their finger from left to right, and after clicking a picture or recording a clip, editing tools can be used to write on the image or the video. Now Stories feature is available on the Explore tab.
“More than 100 million people visit Explore every day to discover photos and videos from people they don’t yet follow. The new suggested stories section highlights the most interesting Stories from across Instagram’s vast global community,” the company said in its blog post.
Instagram, the photo and video sharing service owned by Facebook, came into existence in 2010. In 2012, Facebook bought it for about $750 million. At that time, the app had about 22 million monthly active users. Since then, the app has grown exponentially, due to ease of sharing images. In the past two years, Instagram’s user base has more than doubled. It reached 400 million monthly active users in September 2015, and since then it had added another 100 million monthly active users by June 2016, which were added at a faster rate compared to the previous 100 million users.
Facebook Messenger currently has over 1 billion users, whereas WhatsApp is being used by over 900 million people.
In June 2016, Instagram hit a new milestone in its history by crossing the 500 million user mark. Instagram also revealed that over 80% of its users were based outside the U.S.
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