Facebook says one in five videos shared on the service are live streams
Facebook’s big live-streaming bet is starting to pay
off. According to the company’s head of video, Fidji Simo, one in five
videos shared on the social network is of the Facebook Live variety. The
stat, shared by Simo in a public status update on her personal page,
reveals that Facebook’s costly and time-consuming shift toward live
broadcasting is actually starting to work. Simo also says that the
amount of time users spend watching these Live videos has quadrupled in
the past year.
Ever since Meerkat’s breakout success at the SXSW
festival in March 2015, live video has become the prime focus of the
biggest social networks. It makes sense — in the age of unlimited video
streaming and on-demand everything, the one type of content that still
holds relevance is the live moment. Whether these videos are coming from
a news organization or a media company or one of your friends, Facebook
sees all of it as the next step in its mission to command more of
users’ attention to keep creators from flocking to platforms like
Snapchat that it does not control.
This has been an expensive endeavor. Facebook paid media
companies, athletes, and celebrities (including Vox Media, the parent
company of The Verge) upwards of $50 million last year
to produce these more polished live videos. The idea, then, was to
flood Facebook with high-quality videos to test the platform and gather
data on what worked and didn’t, as well as to help users adjust to a
shift in what the News Feed algorithms would be prioritizing.
In January, Facebook began pulling its algorithms away
from promoting those videos and reportedly did not renew its one-year
contracts with the 140 or so big-name producers it used in 2016, according to Recode. Facebook still wants those producers on its platform, and it now has plans to pay out large sums to get longer, higher-quality videos on its platform to compete more directly with Netflix and Amazon.
But the goal now with Live is to try and urge many more
everyday Facebook users to try it now that the format is familiar.
That’s precisely why the company is spending millions of dollars to
promote the platform using flashy TV advertisements and other
high-profile marketing tools. It’s also no secret that Facebook is using
Live as one of its many anti-Snapchat tools — many of the newest and
most familiar features of Live, like live masks and other video filters,
were cribbed directly from Snapchat.
The article was published on : theverge
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