Menlo Park, California – Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) declared in their newsroom they are going to start testing a new live video function with a small percentage of people in the US on iPhones.
The giant, leader of all social networks, will release a new feature that will allow users share live video and collages to make them feel closer than ever to their friends and family.
The added capacity of sharing live videos comes in a world where Periscope, Ustream and Youtube are responding to a new market thirsty of live interaction and ephemeral information.
Over the last years Facebook have bought Whatsapp, Instagram and Oculus, spending tens of billions. Also, the company it’s making drones in order to bring the Internet to distant areas and recently they allied with Apple Music and Spotify to introduce music directly in people’s feeds. In other worlds, in just a few years the company have expanded its horizons through a more technological world that it’s getting bigger everyday and won’t turn back.
When the feature becomes available for users, they could tap the Update Status and then Live Video to share a moment in just a few seconds. Users could decide if they want to share the video only with their friends or with the whole word. Descriptions can also be added and people can comment or like.
It was pointed out that algorithmically-determined close friends will be notified when users go live. Also, people will be able to subscribe to get notified when their favorite friends and users are streaming.
“Building live video for Facebook was a challenging exercise in engineering for scale. With Live for Facebook Mentions, we had to solve for huge traffic spikes. Public figures on Facebook can have millions of followers all trying to watch a video at once; creating new tricks for load balancing became our goal.” wrote engineers Federico Larumbe and Abhishek Mathur.
The company also introduced what they call a new way to share experiences captured with a phone camera. Now pictures and videos that are taken together will group into a scrolling, moving collage. When users tap on their photos they will see recent moments from their camera roll organized into collages based on where they took them, Facebook wrote in a press release. Collages are available now on iPhone and will be available on Android early next year.
Everyday more than 8 billion videos are viewed on Facebook. Thousands of people have become trending stars due to their shows, skills and cinematographic abilities on Youtube, which is also a source of money for them. Vine famous users are also going through a similar path as they are getting paid by sponsors. Facebook seeks to boost their video platform with the new features.
“To be fair, it’s not actually an exaggeration to say that Facebook has been a part of a major transformation in human communications, or that it hasn’t had meaningful impact. I think of a friend who reports on and in war zones telling me that she keeps in contact with sources on the ground primarily through Facebook or Facebook-owned WhatsApp”, wrote Ingrid Burrington, writer for The Atlantic and fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute.
Source: Facebook