According to TechCrunch, Facebook rolled out a number of important updates to their live video features this autumn.
In addition to making changes to Facebook Live, they updated Facebook Watch Party and the Creator Studio with exciting new features and metrics.
If you haven’t kept on top of these changes, that’s ok—we’re going to break them down for you right now.
Changes to Facebook Live
Facebook implemented several highly requested changes to Facebook Live this fall. The first feature they added is a rehearsal feature that allows broadcasters to go live without their audience seeing them.
Only page administrators and editors can view these broadcasts, which are designed to help professional broadcasters test out new production setups and show formats before revealing them to their audiences.
Facebook also added a feature that enables broadcasters to trim the beginning and ending of their live videos, and raised the broadcast limit from four hours to eight hours.
This change gives broadcasters the flexibility to stream longer events such as live sports, news events, and gaming broadcasts.
Finally, Facebook released an update that will allow broadcasters to use apps to stream to multiple platforms at once. This will enable professional broadcasters to reach more of their audience with one broadcast.
Changes to Facebook Watch Party
Facebook has also made a few changes to Watch Party recently.
They gave Watch Party users the ability to schedule a party in advance to build buzz and excitement, which will prove useful for marketers. They also added replays, which allow stragglers to watch the video even after the party has ended.
In this round of updates, users were also given the ability to tag business partners in branded content, which will be useful for marketers and businesses alike.
Changes to the Creator Studio
You might’ve noticed that a few new metrics were added to the Creator Studio this fall.
Two new metrics for Facebook Watch Party were added:
- Minutes viewed
- Unique 60s viewers
The new unique 60s viewers metric represents the total number of unique users who watched at least 60 seconds of the watch party.
The Creator Studio dashboard also got an update. Facebook added a new visualization layer called Loyalty Insights, which tells creators which videos drive the highest numbers of return viewers and are most popular with their audience.
Facebook updated their auto-captioning feature this fall as well and added support for 13 more languages, including:
- Arabic
- Chinese
- German
- Italian
- Russian
This update greatly expanded the feature’s capabilities, as it only used to support English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Hopefully this change will allow businesses and creators to reach a more global audience.
Another new feature in the Creator Studio that Facebook announced this fall is a Distribution metric that scores each video’s performance. The score is based on some of the page’s historic average metrics, including:
- 1 minute views
- Average minutes watched
- Retention
This new metric will allow creators and marketers to determine how successful their video is at a glance.
Video content is becoming increasingly popular, with 85% of all Internet users in the US watching videos monthly. So it makes sense that Facebook released so many new live video features this fall.
Hopefully Facebook will continue to improve their live video platforms to make them more usable for creators and marketers.