Facebook expanding videos
Facebook has had an extremely successful 2015, having achieved a number of high-profile additions to its platform and brand. It began by revamping its digital advertising (and the impressive customer segmentation that followed), refined and introduced its sponsored and embedded video clips into our news feeds (nearly four billion videos a day are watched on Facebook) along with introducing its digital news stream which has change the way we view and engage with news content online.
But possibly its biggest and most exciting achievement was left for late October when it put to bed speculation of its entry into the digital video sharing space… yes that’s right, a big social media clash is imminent, as Facebook prepares to take on the world's most dominant video sharing platform, YouTube.
It's understood that roughly 100 million Internet users watch some form of video content online, each-and-every day, some educational, some not so...
Many believe the move is a play for the growing mobile advertising marketed which is expected to top 100 billion by 2016. Facebook have said in a statement that they will certainly introduce paid adverts in their new platform, but just how still remains a mystery. They did however explain that video publishers will get a cut from the ads that appear within the stream, similar to YouTube. But did not divulge how much.
What, Where & How?
According to a statement released on the Facebook Newsroom, the project has been described as a “dedicated place for people to go when they exclusively want to watch videos,” which will help “people discover, watch and share videos on Facebook that are relevant to them.”
The videos will be stored in a dedicated hub inside the Facebook mobile app, or from the “Favourites” section on the left-hand side of the News Feed on the web. Similar to YouTube, the Facebook videos platform will give users the option to search for video content from around the world.
Other tests have been done on a pop-out video player to allow users to watch video content while continuing to scroll through their newsfeed, and a “save for later” button on videos so people can bookmark content they want to come back to.
A large part of Facebook's strategy and its selling point to date will centre around its ability to push and suggests video content based on videos you have saved or watch throughout the Internet, clips that friends and family may have forwarded you (or watched themselves) or topical clips based on current events and news media around the world.
While Facebook hasn’t gone into specifics on the technology behind this sort of AI integration, the general consensus industry-wide is that it will all be algorithmically generated in a similar manner to Facebook’s “trending” items.
When
Facebook says that its testing has been going extremely well and is expecting to launch the feature into most of its iPhone users apps shortly, bringing the video sharing to Android users “in the coming months.”
Check out the video below for more details.