Facebook Live now available on Android as the U.S. rollout begins

“As Mark said this morning during his Town Hall Q&A in Berlin, we’ve seen that people really enjoy sharing and interacting with live video on Facebook“, a company spokesperson told Re/code when we reached out about the internal changes. He added that people in more than 30 countries now have the feature (it was previously limited to U.S. iPhone users).

Facebook has announced that the Periscope-style live video broadcast feature it launched in the USA last month will be rolling out to more than 30 new countries “in the coming weeks” – though it hasn’t revealed which ones.

With 1.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook has the kind of scale that any company, particularly mobile video startups, would die for, but that doesn’t necessary mean every new feature or service will succeed. “I think you’re going to see a lot of that on Instagram and Facebook, and if the Twitter folks do a good job, I think you’ll see a lot more of that on Twitter too”, he added. In a way, think of it like Periscope, with the exception that it is not a standalone app and is a feature built-in to the main FB app. At the end of the broadcast, the broadcast video is automatically saved to the user’s timeline and is treated as a video – users can hence delete the saved broadcast if they want.

Readers: Have you ever broadcast or viewed a Facebook Live video? Before you start broadcasting, you can choose your audience and write a description, and during the broadcast, you can see who’s watching, who’s tuning in, and who’s commenting.

Last summer was the first time Facebook introduces us to the feature, but back then, only celebrities had access. The “Live” feature on Facebook requires friends or followers to quickly join the stream, otherwise it’s not fun or effective.