Musical.ly, the music based social network that helps users create music videos is expanding into live streaming with a new platform – live.ly.

With the new live.ly app users can live stream their videos, which will be watchable from musical.ly. The company have started making live.ly available to certain users that will expand to it’s entire user base over the next few weeks.

Musical.ly gained popularity mainly for it’s lip syncing features that meant you could easily create videos of you singing, dubbed with the original song. This resonated with teens everywhere and grew into an 80 million strong userbase. As it’s popularity grew, so did it’s purpose as co-CEO Alex Zhu said: “People started using musical.ly in different ways which we didn’t anticipate.”

This unexpected use no doubt informed their new live.ly streaming platform. Live streaming has become incredibly popular with YouTube, Facebook, and even Twitter integrating live streaming options into their services. It will be interesting to see how users respond to and use live.ly, but it has a lot to live up to if it plans to reach the levels of competitors.