Every few months or so, a new social trend becomes “the thing”. Live broadcasting seems to be the thing these days. This started with Meerkat and was very soon followed by Twitter’s Periscope. It’s been a good seven months since the start of the new trend and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook started its Facebook Live video streaming service, aka Meerkat and Periscope competitor. At that time the service was announced only for celebrities through the Facebook Mentions app. Facebook has now confirmed that the service will soon be available to all Facebook verified users.
When asked about when the service will be available to the normal user, Live Product Manager, Vadim Lavrusik said:
We think this will be an awesome experience for both public figures and also users. We want to get feedback from both public figures and viewers as we evolve the product.
Facebook has a tradition of copying popular apps or services to keep its social network updated with the latest trends. When any service, app or anything related to communications gets wide appraisal, Facebook copies it if buying it isn’t feasible.
Virtual reality platform, SnapChat competitor, hashtags support, Gif support and many other such services have been launched or bought by Facebook over the years to stay relevant in the industry. Video Streaming service has been available on Facebook using NomadCast for quite some time and YouTube also has the service but only for professional events and personnel.
Meerkat started it all and has a motto of view it when it’s live or miss it. Periscope videos can be replayed up to 24 hours after they have been streamed. Facebook with its vast infrastructure will keep the videos on the broadcaster’s timeline permanently and those streams will become video content that can be viewed at any time after the broadcast. Just like its competitors, Facebook Live broadcasters can view live comments of the viewers as they stream their videos.
Facebook is behind the curve in live streaming but could catch up due to the sheer size of its userbase
Facebook believes that by having the biggest fan reach, public figures will choose its service over its competitors. Broadcasters could get more feedback from their fans by using the Live service. Other than that, since the videos will stay on the timelines permanently, the comments will continue a long time after the broadcasts.
Another reason that Facebook has started with celebrities and then verified users is to teach users what and how to broadcast so that video streaming stays fun and enjoyable. Facebook understood that if the service launched for every user, they would have a plethora of low quality videos saying “Have a look at dinner or pet or something”.
It’s still not known when the service will become available to all verified users but when it does, we could have a lot of journalists and athletes with their video streams on our timelines. This means that a wide-scale user launch is still farther away. Periscope has already hit 10 million registered users so Facebook Live has quite a long way to becoming the biggest live streaming service.
Source: WSJ
