Facebook Live Broadcasting Coming to Android

Android users, have yous been feeling left out while your iPhone-toting friends share live video on Facebook? We have some good news.

Facebook on Friday announced that information technology is expanding alive video dissemination to Android. The social network plans to begin rolling out the feature "in the next week," starting in the U.Due south., with support for more than countries "coming before long."

"We know that people on Android dear interacting with live videos—more than 50 percent of people watching alive videos are using Android devices," Facebook Production Manager Vadim Lavrusik and Applied science Manager Dave Capra wrote in a blog post. They added that people sentinel these broadcasts more than three times longer when they're live, compared to when they're archived.

"We'll keep to whorl this out to more people too equally Pages in countries around the world in the coming weeks," Lavrusik and Capra wrote.

To share live video from your device, simply tap "What'south 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 circulate, you'll run across the number of live viewers, the names of your friends who are tuning in, and a existent-fourth dimension stream of their comments. When yous wrap upward the circulate, it will exist saved to your Timeline, where you lot tin go on information technology for friends to spotter afterwards or delete it if yous said or did something embarrassing.

Meanwhile, when you're watching a alive video, yous can tap the Subscribe button to be notified the next time that person starts broadcasting.

Facebook first started experimenting with alive streaming this summer, but at the fourth dimension limited the capability to celebrities with verified profiles. In Dec, the company started testing it with a "small pct" of regular, non-famous U.South. users on iPhones. That same calendar month, Facebook extended the feature to all verified pages (aka those with blue checkmarks). Facebook tardily last month expanded the feature to all iPhone users in the U.S. By at present, people in more than thirty countries tin can share alive video via iOS.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.

Near Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's expert on fettle and smart home products. Teaching yoga for virtually 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fettle trackers, heart rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, strength training machines, treadmills, and more than. Angela also tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to proper name a few.