Huffington Post Live screen

The Huffington Post launched its new live video network today, hosting conversations with members of its community in a bid to include "voices not normally heard in the traditional media".

HuffPost Media Group president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington and HuffPost Live president Roy Sekoff introduced the new platform, before the first discussions got underway.

HuffPost Live, which was announced last month, can be viewed at this link. According to a Huffington Post report, there will be "eight hours of live programming out of New York and four hours out of Los Angeles each weekday".

Introducing the new platform with Huffington, Sekoff: "We're at this great seismic moment, where we're shifting from just presentation to participation".

Demonstrating the current levels of engagement with its "active" community", Huffington said that Huffington Post has received 175 million comments since its launch. Sekoff added that 70 per cent of those are replies to other comments.

"People are not just commenting, they're actually having conversations," Sekoff said. "We decided to bring those conversations front and centre".

Users of HuffPost Live are able to watch live discussions, and add their own comments to a stream running alongside the feed. They can also look at future discussions scheduled for the coming hours and use the "resource well" to find out more about the booked guests, do some background reading and even indicate an interest in taking part in the segment themselves.

Once users have started playing a live discussion they can continue to listen to the conversation as they move around the network, and perhaps look into future segments.

A total of 10 hosts will run the live discussions, with videos archived for viewing at a later date.

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