Facebook is a new TV

Get ready to watch even more videos

Facebook has been betting on video for several years. The company increases the volume of rollers in users and hires people who can move this direction. By February 2017, it finally became clear how ambitious the company's plans are - she wants to replace the TV.

Autople

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the video is Facebook's “Great Priority”. By that time, the social network has already been introduced by the video launch of the video in the news feed, as well as the statistics of views and video rejects. And Zuckerberg guessed with the direction: from January 2014 to January 2015, the number of videos published by users on Facebook increased by 75 percent (and within the United States-94 percent).

Automobile is the most annoying and at the same time the most working function related to video. The user simply leaf through the tape, and the video, which is on the screen, begins to play himself. Often the first few seconds are enough to become interested and watch the video to the end. And there Facebook palms others.

In February 2017, Facebook decided to go even further: now in mobile applications the video will be launched with sound (if the sound mode is not included in the phone itself). And this makes sense: now the video is launched without sound, and 85 percent of users are watching them like that. If desired, the automatic start of the sound can be disabled.

TVs

Facebook does not yet make his TVs (there was enough failure of a Facebook -elphone), but the existing ones are very striving to get into. In October 2016, Facebook learned to send videos to the nearest TVs with Apple TV or Chromecast prefixes.

Now the video section of the social network has independent applications for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV, and in the future, versions are planned for other platforms.

Original content

In June 2016, Facebook hired Ricky Van Vin, co -founder of the entertaining site of Collegehumor. His position is called the "Head of the Global Creative Strategy." In February 2017, Mina Lefivra came to the company, before that-the top manager of MTV. At the end of January, it became known about the appointment of Tamara Khvnak, the former director of musical partnerships in YouTube and Google Play.

All these appointments should help social networks make professional video content. Van Win has already begun negotiations with television companies and video manufacturers about an exclusive release of a television level show on Facebook.

Facebook is also negotiating with music labels and copyright holders - the company wants users to be able to add music to their videos, without violating copyright. It is possible that in the future the social network will want the musicians to release their clips from her, and not on YouTube.

Direct broadcasts

Another important part of the Facebook video section is direct broadcasts. In April 2016, the BuzzFeed publication pulled rubber rings onto the watermelon, broadcasting what was happening on Facebook. This was observed on the air of 800 thousand people, and the whole video was watched 11 million times.

The video about the watermelon was a Facebook record holder , until the 37-year-old Kandis Payne made a broadcast in the Chubakki mask. Video with a laughing woman sitting in the car watched more than 160 million times.

The case of a simple American Payne is an exception to the rules, a lot of views are gaining, as a rule, the broadcasts of celebrities and the media. And Facebook pays them a lot of money for this: popular users (including those who were promoted in YouTube or Vine), she allocated $ 2.2 million, wrote The Wall Street Journal in 2016. The company paid almost 50 million to stars and media companies, such as Buzzfeed.

At the beginning of 2017, Recode wrote that it is not going to extend this partnership with the media Facebook. But the social network is trying other formats: for example, the broadcasts of the Mexico Championship in football and the Student Championship in the computer game Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard.

Advertising in the video

The reason Facebook is trying to climb on TVs is prosaic - money. The television advertising market in the United States is estimated at $ 70 billion.

The bet is made on long videos: the company has already begun to test the video reject format, which is shown 20 seconds after the start of viewing or later (the video for this format should be no shorter than one and a half minutes). At the same time, Facebook decided to increase the priority of the shows of long videos.

Along with this, the social network is actively trying to attract advertisers who buy advertising on TV. For them, the company has created a special tool for placing ads, and also ordered Nielsen research: it showed that Facebook has an additional five percent of the spectators that television has no.

True, Facebook did not ask for its own measurements: in September 2016, the company admitted that by mistake it was very much overestimated by broadcast views. In 2017, it turned out how much: Nielsen said that after adjusting the methodology for analyzing the audience in October, the number of views counted fell by 94 percent-from almost 10 billion to half a billion (there are no data from separate videos). It seems that the victory over YouTube and television is still far away.

Sultan Suleimanov