Instagram Testing Live Video

Facebook’s all-out embrace of live video appears to be affecting Instagram.

A new report from a Russian news site shows live functionality embedded into Instagram stories, with a bold “LIVE” banner on what is apparently a live video appearing at the front of the stories feed.

The report from T Journal also shows the user interface for going live from Instagram, which includes a giant red button reading “Go Insta!”

According to The Verge, Instagram declined to comment.

 Tech sources have been saying for more than a year that Instagram would add live video eventually. Facebook believes that fully immersive live experiences are the future—it’s one of the reasons the company is investing so heavily in virtual reality—and it sees live video as a bridge to get there.

Live video is also a way to attract spending from the lucrative television advertising market, which Facebook is working very hard to crack.

Instagram’s addition of Snapchat-style stories to the app this summer appears to have given the company a convenient place inside the product to use the new format.

Looking at the screenshots posted to T Journal, it’s easy to imagine opening Instagram and browsing a series of live channels to see what they’re broadcasting at any given moment.

According to a Google translation of the T Journal article, clicking the icon in the screenshot above took the user to a page of “popular live broadcasts”, which returned an error.

The report said a user discovered the live button while running the beta version of Instagram on Android.