Going Live

Snapchat, Periscope, Twitch—I’ve watched people livestream their lunch, their commute, their thoughts, just broadcasting their mundane lives to strangers who barely care. Now Instagram’s joining in. They’re adding livestreaming to Stories because apparently 100 million daily users weren’t enough of an audience for your unfiltered moment.

The formula is simple: your broadcast disappears when you stop, you get an hour maximum, you control the comments. Instagram’s rolling it out slowly, testing in a few countries before it hits the US, Germany, UK in a couple weeks.

There’s something appealing about it, I think. The immediacy. No editing, no curation, just point and speak. And since Stories vanish, it feels more casual than a YouTube video, more raw than streaming on Twitch. That’s the pitch, anyway.

But it’s still just another way to turn your afternoon into content. To make the unremarkable feel worth watching. Instagram knows this. They’re betting that’s what you want—a frictionless way to be seen by people following you, even if they’re not really watching, just scrolling while their coffee gets cold.

I’ll probably try it once. Then I’ll forget about it, like I do with most new features. The thing I wonder about is the people who don’t forget—the ones who start streaming every moment, every thought, every nothing. Does it change how they experience things? Or does it just get boring first?