In the social media world, livestreams have become an important feature set to have and it is understandable since they usually lead to increased engagement which is a metric companies love to see.
The Facebook ecosystem has been bolstering its livestreaming ecosystem for a while now and one of its subsidiaries, Instagram, announced its own live video platform around 3 months ago. Instagram had promised to launch the Live Video feature in the future and they have finally done it by rolling it globally.
When you eventually get the update, to start a live video, you only need to make a swipe right gesture to activate the camera. Choose Live Video and it will start broadcasting the feed to your audience. Your followers will be notified and they will watch it by tapping on your Live Story at the top or depending on your privacy settings, on the Explore page. You will be able to see how many people are viewing the broadcasts as well as see the stream of comments and hearts. Also according to Instagram’s help page , you can turn off commenting which can come in handy.
This is a wake up call for Periscope since Instagram has the numbers and the engagement statistics that can threaten the Twitter owned live broadcasting network. 150 million people use Explore according to the company which rivals the reach Periscope has on Twitter. You can bet Instagram will monetize this feature somehow like how they did it with Stories, but from now on, don’t be shocked if people use it as their preferred Live video platform.
