Here’s Why You Can’t Live Stream on Instagram Anymore
When Instagram launched its now-iconic Live feature nearly a decade ago, the concept was simple: Instead of sharing a “permanent” post or story that would disappear after 24 hours, you could share a fleeting moment with your followers at any time. That’s how the feature has worked ever since, at least until now.
There is now a subscriber threshold before you can start broadcasting live.
As TechCrunch reports , Instagram now requires at least 1,000 followers to go live. Additionally, your account must be public, meaning private accounts will no longer be able to go live, even if they’ve reached the 1,000 follower minimum.
You don’t need to read my article to know if this applies to you. If you try to go live from a private account or an account with less than 1,000 followers, Instagram will block you and show you the following pop-up notification :
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I don’t understand why Instagram still offers this feature to users who aren’t eligible. Perhaps the company is hoping that users will be more upset or frustrated by the complete loss of the ability to live stream, and that keeping this tab will help get the word out to those who are interested in live streaming without the right conditions.
This change isn’t unprecedented: As TechCrunch notes, TikTok also requires at least 1,000 subscribers to go live. YouTube has its own restrictions, too: It requires at least 50 subscribers to use its live-streaming feature. So Instagram isn’t suddenly the only platform that doesn’t allow all of its users to go live at any time.
Losing an opportunity is never a good thing
But in my view, the issue isn’t how Instagram compares to other platforms, but that the company is taking away a long-standing feature from users without explanation. Maybe it saves the company money, maybe it reduces the number of live streams at any given time. But it’s always going to be hard to justify shutting down a feature that was previously available to all users — in this case, a feature that’s been around for nearly 10 years.
While this will affect fewer users, it’s functionally no different than if Instagram decided to stop you from posting Stories until you reached a certain number of followers, or stopped you from adding music to your posts until you got a certain number of likes. It’s easy to limit features when they launch, but it’s another thing to do so when those features have been an integral part of the platform for so many years.
The new rules certainly prevent me from going live, which I didn’t want to do initially.