Not to be left behind by Snapchat and Twitter, photo-sharing network Instagram has begun to string together video content live events like award shows and sports games.
Instagram started with Sunday’s Golden Globe Award show, and will do the same for the College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday through a partnership with ESPN, BuzzFeed first reported and Instagram confirmed to Coins2Day. ESPN will create some of the content for the football game’s special stream of curated video.
Users can access these special streams of video through the Explore section of the Instagram app, where a banner with the name of the event sits at the top of the section. When a user taps it, the videos begin to play, one by one. Each video can be skipped to move on to the next.
A small team of Instagram employees are in charge of curating the videos that appear in those streams, according to the report. For the college football championship, the videos will include content from ESPN, from the colleges, and from fans. The curated stream will be available for viewing for 24 hours only starting at 5:30 p.m. PST, according to a company spokesman.
Curating videos around an event or theme is, of course, nothing new in the world of social media. Snapchat, the current darling of teenage users, started doing this in 2014, with the roll out of “Our Story.” The feature strings together users’ photos and videos from an event like concert of sporting event, and it lets users see content from others who aren’t their friends. Instagram has already done this in the past, but has focused on themes like holidays, not pre-planned, one time events like an awards show, and hasn’t teamed up with a media partner until now.
Twitter also recently joined the game with the debut of Moments in October, which aims to serve up content about the latest and biggest news in a separate section of the service and includes video.
