Live.ly to fold into main Musical.ly app

Musical.ly is merging its related app, Live.ly, into the core mobile entertainment service. Musical.ly lets people record videos of themselves lip syncing to popular songs, while Live.ly offers hosting of live video broadcasts, a niche that was briefly a hot topic for the startup space. The Live.ly service will be folded into the Musical.ly app and the Live.ly app will be taken down from the App Store and Google Play.

The consolidation occurs shortly after Facebook announced a very similar platform called Lip Sync Live. This concept became popular with young users, enough that Musical.ly was sold to Toutiao for between $800 million and $1 billion.