Facebook has been paying some publishers and celebrities to publish live videos. In order to get mass adoption, it’s looking at adding commercials. Matt Navarra and Moshe Isaacian recently showed this screen shot which shows the early signs of the ability to add commercials is already built into the back-end code of Live.
Recently, FB announced it was adding the ability to have more than one source for Live, which opens up multiple locations.
It’s not hard to see this as making it possible for people to compete with TV newscasts. Imagine a host, tossing to a reporter on location, and then adding in commercial breaks. Sound familiar?
“We think video is going to be a big opportunity.” – Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook stockholder meeting
Zuckerberg said he looks at the 1.6 billion Facebook users and he sees 5 billion that he has yet to reach. He thinks video is an integral part of bringing people together in new ways.
First comes the product. He says they are focusing on making the product better and growing the base over the next three years. Along the way, options to monetize the video will expand the number of businesses to participate.
Video for video sake isn’t all that compelling on its own. A boring guy on live video is still… a boring guy. Just ask Periscope and Meerkat, who have seen sage plummet after an initial period of excitement.
YouTube found much the same. Once you get past the viral videos, most of the amateur videos get little to no viewing What does get viewing is a handful of YouTube “Stars” and professionally created videos.
Photoshop allowed almost anybody to do high quality professional graphics and Final Cut Pro did the same to editing video. Tools like this used to take expensive hardware and extensive training. By expanding the tools for Facebook live video and allowing people access to tools similar to what the professionals use, it has the ability to grow the quality and attract businesses into the mix.
You can listen to Zukerberg’s discussion with stockholders here.
Paul Dughi.com 