Image Credit: TechCrunch

On Monday, Facebook and its other affiliate sites were down and out for the count for a number of hours in a rare lengthy outage. This led to some outcry, as well as some pretty hilarious memes - but that's neither here nor there!

Facebook announced today that they are rolling out the co-streaming feature for all of their creators on their Facebook Gaming platform. The feature allows users to team up and stream with each other, while enabling viewers to navigate between co-streams and determine which perspective they'd like to view the action from.

Previously, this feature was only available to people who were a part of Facebook Gaming's partner program. It's now seeing a wider release, but is still limited to only four co-streamers at a time. 

"With co-streaming, we aim to increase discoverablity for creators, encourage collaboration between creators and elevate the overall viewing experience for everyone," Facebook said in a blog post.

Twitch has offered similar functionality through Squad Stream since 2019, so Facebook is playing catchup - but it is gradually gaining on YouTube Gaming in popularity, so the addition of this option, however belatedly, can only help their cause. Twitch still dominates in both hours streamed and hours watched, so we'll see just how long they keep hold of that lead.

I have done a co-stream once or twice, though I wasn't the primary "host" - my friend was. Four of us streamed our perspectives raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, and it was pretty neat to see the functionality of a chat we could all read, plus still have our own Twitch channels and chats open so that we could welcome viewers that way also.

Have you used a co-streaming feature before on any platform? Tell me about your experience!