When Facebook launched its personalised live-streaming feature, which is called ‘Live’, the feature was only made available to users with verified profiles. It means the feature is exclusively available only for high-profile accounts, such as celebrities or public figures.
While this has bothered some people, it’s quite obvious that it’s just the way Facebook testing the waters, while waiting to see where the trend would go before pushing too hard on it.
Months later, Facebook has announced that live-streaming capability on the platform would be made available to all users, a move which has the potential to change the game on the live-streaming. Still, Facebook didn’t go all out on the option. Its performance is slowly rolling out full access to Live – at a rate of around 5,000 users per day. Moreover, Live video content can only be broadcast for a maximum of 30 minutes, where other live-streaming apps like Periscope and Blab have no such time restriction.
However, that may be about to change. Yesterday, Facebook took another step towards working with the trend of live-streaming video, opening up the option to all verified Pages on the platform. Here is an official announcement from Facebook:
“Today, we’re beginning to roll out the ability for verified Pages to share live video using Facebook for iOS. With Live, sports teams, media companies, brands, and other verified Pages can make announcements, share breaking news updates, take fans behind the scenes, host Q&As, and more.”
Facebook’s already looking to add in separate tabs for shopping and videos posted and shared by your friends and connections, it’s not hard to image they’d look to extend this, and their targeting and customisation capacity, based on your listed on-platform details and behaviors, are beyond what can be offered by anyone else. A Facebook Live video platform, could be very engaging, indeed.
Facebook said thousands of people are using Live and are getting bigger viewership each day. With the reach and awareness are the key goals of any live-streaming strategy, there’s likely no where better to be.