A live streaming experiment launched by Musical.ly in 2016 will soon cease to exist — at least on its own app. Live.ly, which took advantage of a mobile live streaming boom around the time of its debut, will be folded into the Musical.ly app.
Musical.ly didn’t say when it would merge with Live.ly, though it is expected to pick up a host of new live streaming features as a result of the decision. “Live-streaming from Live.ly is moving to Musical.ly — our goal is to make it easy to enjoy your favorite short videos and your favorite live content, all in one place,” a Musical.ly representative told Variety.
After Live.ly’s June 2016 launch, it need just four days to claim 500,000 installs. Some creators said they made $23,000 per week on the app, while others launched their own original programs there. By mid-July 2016, Live.ly had surpassed the two million download mark.
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But a lot has changed at Musical.ly since the app — which lets its users lip sync along to their favorite songs — was acquired by Chinese media company Bytedance in 2017. Musical.ly North American president Alex Hofmann left the company a few months ago, and Variety reports that Live.ly downloads fell 41% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2018.
Live.ly’s launch and sudden growth were emblematic of the trendy nature of the mobile live streaming space, which had a big year in 2016. Perhaps that industry has cooled off a bit; at the very least, we can now see that there’s no more space for Live.ly to exist as a standalone app.
