Since Twitter and Twitter-owned Periscope have taken a nice piece of the pie of live streaming videos online, Facebook has decided to take a swing at their rival for live streaming. On Tuesday, Facebook said that they’re going to start ranking live videos higher in people’s news feeds while those videos are being streamed live using Facebook’s live-stream feature.
Doing this will allow people to find out of a friend, brand, publisher or celebrity is streaming live. Not only is Facebook letting people subscribe to notifications on when a live stream starts, but the higher profile distribution could attract brands, celebrities and media companies that are looking to stream live.
There could certainly be some competition between Facebook and Twitter in terms of live streaming. On one hand, Facebook has a much larger audience than either Twitter or Periscope, but Twitter and Periscope are considered to be more amenable to live content than Facebook, who tends to show more out-of-date content and content that popular, but out-dated. But by Facebook treating videos separately from regular videos, the social network improves the idea of getting somebody’s stream in front of the most people in the moment.
Facebook said in a company blog post announcing the move,
“People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live.”
By the looks o it, Facebook is quite interested in becoming the most popular-live streaming video platform online. After all, Facebook has been making quite the move against YouTube for an increase in videos uploaded to their service when compared to YouTube.
The ability to stream live on Facebook for some users began in August 2015, and the company is no in the process of rolling out the feature to normal people who use its iPhone and Android apps.
It was also reported by Re/code last week that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, is “obsessed” with live video. The company’s video team has put live video at the top of their list of priorities.