Facebook earlier only allowed live streaming for celebrities and high-profile journalists, though now the feature will soon be available to all users within the app itself. The networking giant today began testing the Live Streaming video broadcasting feature for a select few users on iOS in the US. However, the new feature will be rolled out all users in the near future, who can send notifications about their broadcasts to close friends.
According to Facebook’s Product Manager Vadim Lavrusik and Thai Tran, bringing Live to all users is the company’s attempt “to help friends and family feel like they’re in the moment with you”.
Notably, Facebook Live Video feature is quite different from other live streaming apps. As on Facebook, a live video broadcast set for public view will only notify a list of your close friends as opposed to other live streaming apps where all your followers get notified.
“The reasons people wanted it were quite different from celebrities. It was really more about inviting friends and families into special moments in people’s lives.” People might broadcast from Facebook during a child’s birthday party, or after reaching the summit of a mountain,” said Julie Zhou, product design director at Facebook.
Also, the new update also includes a new way for sharing your photo collages. The Facebook app on iOS now lets users create collages where they can also add videos to the mix, organizing photos and videos in grids. With just a few taps, users can select the photos and videos they’d like to share and arrange them in grids. Just head over to upload a photo and Facebook will give you the option to pick multiple pics along with videos to make a collage. It will then automatically turn them into a Collage though users do have the option to resize and re-order the tiles to highlight what they’d like.
For now, only the iOS app has been updated with this feature, though Android users don’t need to bet disheartened as the feature will be rolling out on the platform early next year.
