It’s 2015, time to tune into Facebook TV. Gliding over traditional TV Networks, moving beyond the capabilities of YouTube and now personalized and in your stream. Just one quarter into the year and the noise surrounding Facebook’s drive to video has already intensified.
At the start of the year, we saw major media companies utilizing Facebook’s native video player, signaling the end of their video content distribution strategy on YouTube - a trend brought to life by the astonishing fact that Facebook’s native video views had jumped from one billion a day in September 2014 to three billion a day at the end of January 2015.
So let’s take a look at what Facebook has really been up to.
Livestreaming is what all the cool kids are doing these days and Facebook is getting a piece of the action. For the second year in a row, Facebook partnered with HBO to host the red carpet live stream of the Game of Thrones U.S. premiere. They created a fully interactive experience, with the show’s stars answering fan questions through Facebook and sibling platform Instagram.
This is an attempt to move the social focus away from Twitter and over to Facebook, a platform that has traditionally served as a place for users to share thoughts with their friends. Opening up the platform — and the chatter — to the general public is a BRaVe move and Facebook will have to actively encourage users to think of them in this way.
The fact that the Game Of Thrones event is a Facebook exclusive will help too: Facebook put a lot of effort into their Super Bowl and Oscars experiences, but neither was a smash hit and rival Twitter still seemed to be getting the lion’s share of attention. This time, though, there was no official tie to Twitter.
The other big video news out of Facebook is that they will soon run original programming from MSNBC and other news organizations. In fact, MSNBC’s two newest programs will debut on Facebook before they appear on TV or anywhere else.
The trick here will be to get users to start thinking of Facebook as a media outlet, not just a social network. That’s easier said than done; how do you train people who are used to going to Facebook to see how many “Likes” their latest vacation photo got to instead go there to consume news?
How Facebook surfaces the videos will be of interest: Are they at the top of subscribers' newsfeeds every morning or do they just appear randomly in the newsfeed according to the algorithm? The former will let viewers know that this is something new and different and will encourage the desired behavior change.
Facebook made several newsworthy announcements at the F8 Facebook Developer conference that would lead people to believe they are scaling their video offering to drive toward a network approach. Here are a few points to support this theory.
Wall Street research firm Nomura recently forecasted that by 2017 Facebook will reach $3.8 billion in video advertising revenue, while YouTube will be at $8.5 billion. So while a Facebook victory does not appear imminent, the battle is just heating up.
The biggest distinction between Facebook and YouTube is in terms of intent and discovery. Users go to YouTube with the sole intent of watching videos. They search for videos on their own and create their own personalized viewing experiences.
Facebook, on the other hand, curates videos for their users. The videos show up in their newsfeed based on what the algorithm decides that particular user might want to see. There’s no real way to search for video: you either watch what they give you or you don’t.
In many ways, the difference between the two services is like the difference between Spotify and Pandora. YouTube is like Spotify: while there are channels and pre-selected playlists, the beauty of the service is in being able to do your own thing and choose the exact videos you want to see.
With Facebook, like Pandora, you are relying on the service to curate for you. If they’re accurate most of the time, you’ll stick with them, as it’s a lot easier than sorting through things yourself.
Is one model superior? Not really, and we predict most people will make use of both, depending on their mood.
The other difference between YouTube and Facebook is the interface: Facebook keeps tweaking theirs while YouTube still looks a lot like it did in 2004.
That may be changing, however, as the platform recently rolled out a “cards” function. The plan is for this new feature to eventually replace annotations. It’s much slicker, way less 90’s and shows us that YouTube is indeed interested in keeping up with the Joneses.
Our suggestion for Phase 2: Get rid of the anonymous comments, home of some of the internet’s nastiest trolls and the reason why millions of people posted their ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos directly to Facebook.
Facebook is also experimenting with autoplay video, something we predicted a while back. According to a story in Recode, Facebook has been testing a Netflix-like system whereby new videos automatically start playing one after the other, creating a TV-like experience. We think this is a great move for Facebook as it, more than anything, will get users thinking of the platform as a video source.
While Facebook’s attempt to challenge YouTube is moving full speed ahead, they’re not the only ones looking to unseat the champion. Twitter, Snapchat, and Meerkat are all waiting in the wings, along with startups like Vessel, and all are happy to give creators more than just 55 percent of revenue. YouTube won’t go down without a fight, but right now, Facebook seems to be a formidable competitor.
Especially if they figure out live streaming.
