We millennials are lean, mean, streaming machines, and today, Facebook finally hopped aboard the streaming bandwagon.
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Testing for the feature began in December. Anyone watching can subscribe to get a notification when that person next streams live video.
Here’s a real world look at how to use it and what it’s like. Tap “Go Live” and your broadcast will be visible in the News Feed. In fact there’s no indication anywhere that you can do anything beyond your traditional posts. And it’s sort of hidden within other status message settings.
Utilizing Live Video is simple.
On new year’s eve, when a fire raged in downtown Dubai, the BBC was showing state-sanctioned footage from an hour previously, but through the Periscope app you could watch it live nearly as if you were there.
Once you hit he big blue “Continue” button, you’ll be asked to describe your broadcast. You can even choose to share it with just yourself, but where’s the fun in that? In contrast, Periscope now supports both portrait and landscape modes. On Periscope and Meerkat, your live viewers consist mostly of strangers lurking at any giving time on the app. With Facebook Live, however, your friends and people you actually know will be more likely to tune in, making them a far-more engaged audience for your live antics and oversharing. If video is captured in landscape, comments will appear on the right side.
Facebook’s audience of 1.5 billion greatly dwarfs Periscope, with the IOS U.S. app in the hundreds of millions.
Facebook has rolled out an update for iPhone users that enables them to live stream videos on the social media website. Zuckerberg didn’t give a more concrete timetable while discussing the new feature with analysts in a conference call Wednesday following Facebook’s latest quarterly earnings report.
The best part is after the broadcast is ended, the video will be saved on your timeline and it is left to the publishers if they want to keep it or delete after the broadcast. After each broadcast, you get a set of stats, including your total number of viewers, a retention percentage (people who stayed through the whole broadcast out of all the viewers), the amount of time people watched, and displays a long list of every single viewer and, later, replay viewer of your clip. Both services let you save your recorded streams to your phone, though. Of course, it’s hard to know whether or not Facebook will accrue users who have already committed to the other services, but its large user base might be the key to Live Video’s success. That, however, is not how it always works. Have you used Facebook Sports Stadium? Then people can put it on their schedule.
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Lights! Camera! Action! Facebook is home to pictures, videos, comments, news, train-of-thought ramblings, and much more.
