Instagram plans to launch multi-participant livestreams in the coming weeks. In an interview with Lilly Singh, Adam Mosseri shows how it’s done. Adam, Lilly, Nabela and Lilly’s dog Scarbro go live to have a lighthearted competition to see who has the best filter.
The announcement
Mosseri explains, “Finally, at long ado, we are releasing the ability to go live with more than one other person…” and continued to go live with three others in the interview. The process seems identical to going Live with one other participant but. Although Mosseri says it is an exclusive announcement, Instagram worked this feature in the works for some time.
In March of 2020, Mosseri spoke briefly about enabling more participants to go live together. He said this in a Q&A Instagram story with The Social Media Geekout.
Testing
Instagram began testing multi-person livestreams late last year in India. As TikTok is banned in India, it makes for a great place to test new features such as multi-participant livestreams. According to mysmartprice, live viewership grew 60 percent last March. Assumably, viewership would increase more with creators and users going live with multiple people and their own individual followings.
Benefits
Opening a livestream to more participants introduces many benefits and has great potential. Users can include more voices in meaningful conversions. People can have safer public hangouts during the pandemic. A multi-person livestream will bring more engagement and discovery of new creators. People can produce podcasts, talk shows, panels and so much more.
Continuing to give users various options on the platform makes for a better experience. Instagram is rapidly developing their user experience to compete with TikTok as well as YouTube. Any day now we should be able to see this new feature on our feeds.