Facebook is building a bigger and bigger lead in 360 social video by developing these technologies.
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Along with Guide, Facebook introduced another tool that publishers of 360-degree video might find useful. “If you decide to use Guide, once you select these points, people who view your video will automatically be directed around the video as it plays, ensuring that they don’t miss the action-whether that’s a diver plunging into the water or a shark swimming up behind them”.
Publishers will now be able to understand more about how sharing impacts distribution of videos and what kind of content compels people to share. Heatmap is exactly what it sounds like, laying a map over the 360-degree video so that publishers can see which sections of their video are attracting the most eyeballs. Viewers can opt out of the guided view by panning or swiping out of the scene to manually explore other parts of the 360-degree video.
The social network described Guide as a way for publishers to provide viewers with a guided tour of their 360 videos, ensuring that those viewers see key moments. Once all the points of interest have been added, click the Publish button. Unlike viewing in a 360-degree video in a headset, watching the spherical clips on the web may be less intuitive for users.
Guide will be turned on by default.
The likes of GoPro, New York Times and ABC News are already making use of Guide in its 360 videos.
Heatmap is a visual insights tool that displays the portions of the field of view for 360-degree videos that viewers are spending the most time watching.
Note: The Heatmap tool is available for all 360 videos posted since May 1, but the video will need to have over 50,000 unique viewers.
Creators can use Heatmap to inform what points of a video they want in their GuideUsing this feature, creators can inform the viewers by enabling guide on their videos and helping viewers to have a better experience. It can be accessed via your video library, under publishing tools.
The new features start rolling out today and will be made available to all pages over the several of weeks.
With the availability of the new demographic data, publishers will be able to get a clear indication of the type of people who are most engaged with their video.
Since introducing the feature a year ago, Facebook says more than a quarter of a million 360-degree videos have been uploaded to the social media platform. These parameters include demography of audience, live video engagement, and statistics of videos which people share with their friends.
The video metrics tools specifically allow publishers to break out the minutes of a video viewed by age, gender, and top geographic location.
Additionally, the new metrics tools show publishers how aggregate audiences engaged during specific moments of a video.
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Meanwhile, a new tool for 360 videos called Guide allows publishers to set “points of interest” within a video.
