In November 2016, Instagram had announced its Live Video feature. This feature is now being rolled out globally for users.
Instagram’s Live Video feature is part of Instagram’s Stories and will allow users to go live and show their friends/followers a video in real-time when it is captured.
To use the feature Live Video feature to go Live from Instagram, a user just needs to swipe right from the Feed, and go to Stories. The camera offers a Live option, next to Normal and Boomerang mode.
Your friends/followers will be alerted by the app when you go live. During recording, you can see which friends/followers on Instagram are watching your video on the app. Before going Live, the app checks internet connection, and then a countdown begins (1,2,3) before the video goes live (if internet connection is available).
As you go live, your friends will be able to post comment on your live video by tapping on the Comment tab at the bottom.
According to Instagram, the live story will disappear from the app after a user is done with their live story.
The news of Instagram planning a Live Video feature first appeared in October last year when a Russian news website claimed that Instagram is testing the ‘Go Insta’ live video feature for some users on the beta Android app in Russia. The new feature was added in ‘Stories’ section, and for these users, it appeared at the top of the page with a red tag that reads ‘LIVE’. A user had to click a red button that said ‘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, displayed many pictures of a user interface for recording a story, with one bearing a “Go Insta” button.
Last year, Facebook had launched its live video feature globally, and since then the social networking giant was working to push the service with its full capacity.
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.
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.
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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