Instagram Launches New Video Chat Feature To Encourage Users To Stay At Home

The world is currently facing an unprecedented crisis with the coronavirus outbreak, and one of the ways to help prevent further spread of the virus is by staying at home and practicing social distancing. This is done to help lessen the burden on healthcare workers and hospitals, many of whom are currently under immense stress.

However, we imagine that many people at home are no doubt bored and restless as activities that would normally be done in a group and with friends are no longer viable. To help ease that boredom, Instagram has announced a new video chat feature that is designed to help encourage users to remain at home, while at the same time allowing them to remain social.

According to Instagram, “To help people stay connected, we’ve launched media sharing, a new feature that allows you to view Instagram posts together with your friends over video chat. You can start a video chat by tapping the video chat icon in the Direct inbox or in an existing Direct thread, then view saved, liked and suggested photos/videos by tapping the photo icon in the bottom left corner in an ongoing video chat.”

This isn’t exactly a new feature as previously, Facebook had launched a feature called “Watch Together” that allows users to watch videos together. More recently, there is also a new Chrome extension that also enables a similar feature for Netflix, where friends can get together and sync their Netflix streams to watch them and chat at the same time.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Instagram