CTV Advertising Strategies:

Insights from CTV leaders at Dentsu, Horizon Media and more

SECURE YOUR SEAT

Facebook’s Periscope-killer, Live Video, is rolling out to everyone

If pictures of your friends’ posts in your Facebook feed wasn’t annoying enough, imagine seeing them broadcast live. Well, that will soon become a reality.

The social network just announced that a function called Live Video, a.k.a. Facebook’s version of Periscope and Meerkat, is being tested on a “small subset” of U.S. iPhone users before eventually rolling out to everyone. Here’s what its interface looks like:

livestream

“Live video streams automatically appear in their friends’ Facebook news feeds, and broadcasts that have concluded are saved in the timeline like any other video,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

For the past few months, Facebook has tested live video streaming on a smattering of high-profile users, like NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ anchor Lester Holt and Martha Stewart, who used it to answer Thanksgiving questions last week. Even brands, such as Bethenny Frankel’s reduced-calorie food line Skinnygirl, played with it.

Using that exposure from popular and well-followed accounts gives it a larger platform (after all, Facebook boasts 1 billion active users every day) to compete against Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope, two services that offer similar capabilities but on a smaller scale.

Coupled with its booming mobile usage, where it makes 78 percent of its total revenue, video is very lucrative for Facebook since it can charge advertisers more to spend on the feature. While there are no immediate plans to sell pre-roll ads on the live streams, it could be tempting option in the future.

Images via Facebook.

https://digiday.com/?p=149880

More in Media

Digiday+ Research: Publishers pull back their dependence on digital revenue

After a year in which publishers shifted their revenue dependence away from traditional channels and toward digital channels, 2025 has seen a shift back toward more of a balance between traditional and digital revenue sources.

LinkedIn makes it easier for creators to track performance across platforms

Creator data is becoming more accessible to third-party vendors via a new API — another step in LinkedIn’s creator platform evolution.

Ad Tech Briefing: The ‘plumbers’ posing as the unlikely saviors of the internet

After several false dawns, can Cloudflare’s ‘anti-AI scraping tool’ finally offer publishers a road to commercial redemption?