Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
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
How creator talent agencies are evolving into multi-platform operators
The legacy agency model is being re-built from the ground up to better serve the maturing creator economy – here’s what that looks like.
Why more brands are rethinking influencer marketing with gamified micro-creator programs
Brands like Urban Outfitters and American Eagle are embracing a new, micro-creator-focused approach to influencer marketing. Why now?
WTF is pay per ‘demonstrated’ value in AI content licensing?
Publishers and tech companies are developing a “pay by demonstrated value” model in AI content licensing that ties compensation to usage.