Android users, have you been feeling left out while your iPhone-toting friends share live video on Facebook? We have some good news.
Facebook on Friday announced that it is expanding live video broadcasting to Android. The social network plans to begin rolling out the feature "in the next week," starting in the U.S., with support for more countries "coming soon."
"We know that people on Android love interacting with live videos—more than 50 percent of people watching live videos are using Android devices," Facebook Product Manager Vadim Lavrusik and Engineering Manager Dave Capra wrote in a blog post. They added that people watch these broadcasts more than three times longer when they're live, compared to when they're archived.
"We'll continue to roll this out to more people as well as Pages in countries around the world in the coming weeks," Lavrusik and Capra wrote.
To share live video from your device, simply tap "What's on your mind?" at the top of News Feed and select the Live Video icon. You can write a description and select the audience before going live.
During the broadcast, you'll see the number of live viewers, the names of your friends who are tuning in, and a real-time stream of their comments. When you wrap up the broadcast, it will be saved to your Timeline, where you can keep it for friends to watch later or delete it if you said or did something embarrassing.
Meanwhile, when you're watching a live video, you can tap the Subscribe button to be notified the next time that person starts broadcasting.
Facebook first started experimenting with live streaming this summer, but at the time limited the capability to celebrities with verified profiles. In December, the company started testing it with a "small percentage" of regular, non-famous U.S. users on iPhones. That same month, Facebook extended the feature to all verified pages (aka those with blue checkmarks).
Facebook late last month expanded the feature to all iPhone users in the U.S. By now, people in more than 30 countries can share live video via iOS.
Source: pcmag.com
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