Dive Brief:
- According to Digiday, Facebook is set to announce new options with its Live Video at its upcoming F8 developers conference in April.
- The new capabilities will allow live video productions to create broadcast quality video streams through multiple cameras and other options.
- Marketers have already found Live Video to be a successful channel, and in some ways embraced the simplicity of just needing a mobile device to record the streaming content.
Dive Insight:
The format is popular with Facebook’s users as well, with publishers like TMZ getting up to 100,000 viewers for live content. The Digiday article pointed out that part of the appeal was the lack of technical resources required to get live video content to Facebook’s audience. Adding the higher quality capabilities might encourage news networks to stream live content to Facebook at the same time it is broadcast to linear TV.
Separately, last week the social network announced that it was adding daily metrics of how much people watch videos posted, a move that would help publishers.
"This new data gives Page owners a better understanding of when their audiences are watching their videos, providing a more detailed picture of performance that we hope will help publishers inform their video strategies," Facebook Product Manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza wrote in a blog post.
And earlier this month Facebook announced it was changing the news feed algorithm to promote Live Video when the video is streaming and actually live. The decision came after listening to feedback and tracking engagement with Live Video such as how many people watched a video, how long they watched it, and taking actions such as turning the sound on or making the video full screen. Facebook is even considering Live Video a separate content type from normal videos on its platform.
