Musical.ly’s shutdown of Live.ly Contractually Obligated

As part of the acquisition deal of Musical.ly by Bytedance, Musical.ly is redirecting users of its Live.ly app to another app LiveMe. According to a clause in the agreement, if the deal went through, Musical.ly would have to close Live.ly app within six months. Therefore, Live.ly app is being shut down by Musical.ly and its existing users are being pointed to join LiveMe through a message inside the app. After its acquisition last year, Musical.ly is obligated to point Live.ly users to LiveMe for at least 30 days after its closure. Right around the time of acquisition of Musical.ly, Bytedance had put $50 million investment in live-streaming app similar to Live.ly called LiveMe.

Musical.ly is integrating some of Live.ly's feature on it its own platform but it will still not become a direct competitor to LiveMe. Musical.ly is not known as a live streaming app but an app for making lip syncing videos that are edited using app's features.

Though Live.ly was never as big as Musical.ly, it still had 26 million downloads and a good number of active users. This might be one of the reason of its closure last month. LiveMe is bigger than Live.ly with 60 million users given $30 million to broadcasters through its direct virtual gifting program.

Till now, LiveMe has raised $100 million and has a portfolio of apps including a social short video app Cheez, and mobile gaming and e sports live streaming app Fluxr.

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