Facebook’s push into video on the internet is anything but secret. The social media behemoth has been focusing more and more on video integration with its service for more than a year now and it’s continuing to come up with ways to establish itself as a dominant player in the video sharing market. Part of this includes implementing improvements to the way its videos work like with the recently added auto-tagging function. While YouTube still remains at the top of this particular area of the web, Facebook is aggressively pushing into the space with their own hosted video platform and by introducing ways for content creators to make money. Facebook has also been looking at introducing live video into their mobile apps with a yet-to-be-released Facebook Live tab said to be coming at some point, and it appears that they may already be testing the tab in their Android application for some users.
This may suggest that Facebook is getting ready to roll it out to the public on Android soon, although Facebook has yet to confirm any of these details. The inclusion of the Facebook Live feature in its own dedicated tab is said to be part of a redesign of the mobile application, and judging by the screenshots below it appears that at the least the Live tab will look somewhat different from the rest of the app, with a black interface as opposed to the usual white and blue that Facebook has been known for.
According to the source, the version of the app that’s being used is the v77 alpha version of the Facebook app for Android. It’s believed that Facebook themselves are enabling Live video tab on the server side which would mean that users have no control over getting the feature before Facebook decides that it’s ready to push it out the public. If this is a testing phase for the company with a small batch of users, it isn’t impossible to think that they could be nearing the point of introducing the feature for everyone. The sooner the better for Facebook, too, as they would be able to start grabbing users for the platform to better compete with YouTube and other services which already offer apps for live video.
