In moving from the social media sharing concept of "this just happened" to "this is happening now" photo and video sharing service Mobli is attempting to push citizen journalism to an even broader audience.
With the announcement of Mobli 4.0 developers are now offering users the opportunity to share high quality video streaming with followers in real-time.
While Mobli has essentially been living in the shadows of "moment" sharing giants YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Vine, the addition of this live broadcast option could open the door to a much larger group of consumers discovering the joys (and dangers) of citizen journalism.
Mobli 4.0 was designed with that notion in mind as the app's developers spent a good deal of time overhauling the app based around providing a faster performance experience, or again, with a focus on the aforementioned "this is happening now" sharing possibilities. The app is also now open to third-party developers who want to expand the platform's features and functions.
The company's founder and CEO Moshe Hogeg was very clear when discussing why this announcement is a significant one in the social content sphere.
"This is the natural evolution of visual content sharing as we see it, enabling users not only to broadcast live, but rather to fully interact in real-time, in a complete way, with people anywhere, anytime," Hogeg said. "Live content is our main focus for 2014 and we have a lot more to come."
The new upgrade lets the user just touch a button to start broadcasting live. Once live, the user is then immediately sharing real-time videos with their followers. What's especially cool is the fact the user can now also interact with their followers through comments, making the experience even more immersive, more personal and perhaps most of all, more engaging.
While the ethics of news organizations are constantly being tested in this age where everyone has a video camera with them at all times, upgrades like the one being given to Mobli just make it even easier for regular people to catch high quality video of news events as they unfold and instantly broadcast the work live.
This doesn't figure to make life any easier for new organizations as the fear of entrapment cases and the manufacturing of less than worthy news stories becomes even more enticing.
