Once more, three of the biggest social platforms have released a bevy of news, all meant to crowd announcements by competitors, related to their future plans around video.
Twitter is finally beginning the eventual phase-out of Periscope as a standalone app. The company is rolling out an update to the core Twitter app that adds a “Live” button to the Tweet composition feature that lets you begin a live video stream. That’s powered by Periscope’s backend and the broadcast is available within that app, but the primary way people will see it is likely through Twitter.
Live video is also the emphasis of Instagram’s announcement. That network/app (which just announced it now has 600m users) is launching live video that disappears forever once the broadcast is concluded. So people will see you’re streaming live if they’re in the app at the time you’re doing so, but there’s no replay functionality at all. That differs from Facebook Live and even Periscope, which keeps broadcasts around for 24 hours after they’re done and is more of a move against Snapchat’s ephemeral nature than anything else.
Finally Facebook has made two announcements. The more immediate of the two is that it is launching live 360-degree video. That’s similar to functionality YouTube already has but signals an expansion by Facebook. This won’t be available to everyone right now and is being introduced first with National Geographic before rolling out to other publication partners and eventually the mass user base.
The second bit of news from Facebook comes from reports the company is looking to licensing original video in an effort to make the “Video” tab that’s now appearing in the app. It seems they think more high-quality productions will be more attractive than the “hey I’m at my kid’s soccer game” videos that are now taking up a lot of space. That will put the network even more into competition with YouTube, as well as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu as a destination for professionally produced video material.
Everyone’s seeking the attention of the mobile-savvy young social user and are playing various parts of the same game. Video is only getting bigger, particularly on video. A study back in March of this year reported just over half of all video was watched on a mobile device and another reported on how often young adults in the U.S. were watching video on Facebook, YouTube and other networks. Marketers are also more and more interested in focusing on live video on social networks as a way to reach an important audience.
Chris Thilk 