Last chance to save on Digiday Publishing Summit passes is February 9
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:
“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.
More in Media
Bloomberg’s new video hub aims to keep audiences – and subscribers – on its own turf
Bloomberg launched a centralized video hub to improve discovery, boost engagement and keep audiences (and subscribers) on its own platform.
The Rundown: What YouTube creators should expect to change in 2026
YouTube has big changes slated for 2026 across AI content, Shorts, YouTube TV, and more – what does it all mean for creators?
Q&A: Nikhil Kolar, vp Microsoft AI scales its ‘click-to-sign’ publisher AI content marketplace
What started with a limited group of publishers and Copilot as the first customer is now evolving into a more scalable model, with Microsoft testing how pricing, access and compensation might work as usage grows.