Facebook's Livestreaming Feature Is Rolling Out to Non-Celebrities

Attention Periscope and Meerkat!

Facebook will begin rolling out its own livestreaming video product to users on Thursday, the same streaming feature it debuted specifically for celebrities back in August. Now, though, Facebook Live will be available to us regular folks.

The feature lets people with a smartphone broadcast whatever it is they’re doing to their Facebook friends and followers. Once the stream ends, it will live on your Facebook profile as a regular video. It will even autoplay in News Feed just like other Facebook videos do.

Of course, there are already ways to broadcast what you’re up to online, most notably apps like Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope. Both companies took off last March just after SXSW but seem to have slowed down considerably since then. Facebook believes its focus on connecting people with their friends and families — versus the more public nature of Periscope — is the key distinction.

“We think that’s actually going to be a huge differentiator [from] these other more public services,” Julie Zhuo, a director of product design at Facebook, told Re/code. “The unique thing that Facebook has always been [that] at its core it’s about your friends and family.”

The obvious question moving forward will be whether or not there is a market for three separate livestreaming companies. Periscope will continue to benefit from its affiliation with Twitter, but it’s also a standalone app that requires people to download. Facebook Live is built directly into the existing Facebook app, meaning that it should soon be in the hands of millions more users than Periscope just be default.

Whether or not people will actually use Facebook Live is another question entirely. Facebook has a history of building products that look and feel like competitors, but that doesn’t mean they always stick. (Take Facebook’s Snapchat competitors Poke and Slingshot, for example.) Yesterday, presidential candidate Donald Trump attempted a Q&A with followers using Facebook Live, but had to cancel it because of technical difficulties; he used Periscope instead.

The livestreaming feature isn’t the only update to Facebook. The company is rolling out a new product called “Collage” Thursday that scans your phone’s camera roll and suggests groups of related photos and videos to upload to the service. It’s similar to a Facebook photo album, but automates the process of having to search through and select photos to clump together.

Both updates get at the core of Facebook’s mission: to keep users sharing as much as possible with their friends. If you keep sharing and your friends keep sharing, you’ll probably use Facebook more and more frequently.

Facebook Live is available to a small group of iPhone users in the United States beginning today, and will roll out more broadly over time. Collage is available to nearly all iPhone users worldwide beginning Thursday.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via