The changes are being trialled and will roll out globally over the coming months
When Instagram launched its Stories features in August, many people pointed out the similarities between Snapchat’s own “self-destructing” visual diaries.
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Now, the app is borrowing ideas from the likes of owner Facebook, as well as Twitter, for its latest update, by introducing live video streaming into the app.
The app is rolling out Live video in Stories as a “new way for people to connect and interact with their friends right now.” Unlike Facebook Live, however, the videos won’t be saved and can’t be shared on the platform after the stream has ended. Instead, once the video stream is over the Live video will disappear, in keeping with the ephemeral feel of Stories which self-destruct after 24 hours.
Earlier this month, Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom dropped a hint to WIRED that live video would be something the platform is investing more in.
“When I look at the tech world, I see interesting things happening in the different formats we care about: video and photo,” he told WIRED. “I pay a lot of attention to that to figure out how we can remix ideas or come up with very original things ourselves.”
Live video will begin testing today across different networks and devices, and will roll out to the app’s 500 million monthly users over the coming months.
Video is becoming an increasingly important aspect of Instagram. After launching the mini-video app Boomerang in 2015, the platform also increased the length of time for video posts to up to 60 seconds and launched Pinch to Zoom on photos and videos. Systrom told WIRED this will increase in the future.
“There’s nothing that irks me more when people call us a photo-sharing app because there’s so much more that goes on in video these days,” said Systrom.
As well as Stories, Instagram Direct is getting upgraded too. You can now share Instagram Stories as direct messages with your friends, whether that’s your own Story or somebody else’s. Instagram Direct has more than 300 million people using the feature every month, which will benefit from the extra ways to share the content they like on the platform.
The new features in Direct will be available to everyone from today. Update the app to take advantage of the upgrade.
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