Facebook Announces Live Video Updates at Streaming Media East
Publishers will soon have an easier time reaching fans through Facebook Live. Speaking today at the Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Erin Connolly, product manager for Facebook Live, announced three improvements designed to make the platform more useful for publishers: persistent stream keys, live cross-posting, and live rewind.
Persistent stream keys will be a help for publishers or video creators who use the Live API. Thanks to this improvement, they can use a persistent stream key with an encoder to speed up the process of setting up a live stream. Publishers will only need to send one stream key to their production team, because that stream key will be permanent. Publishers can send it in advance for easier collaboration among teams.
"Streamers want to get their content out to their fans as quickly as possible without having to worry about going down a checklist of things to do, and with Facebook allowing streamers to have a persistent stream key, it gives the streamer the ability to quickly and effortlessly start streaming while also giving them less to worry about before starting their stream," says Darkness429, a gaming video creator.
The new live cross-posting feature helps publishers broaden the reach of live videos. Already available for on-demand videos, cross-posting lets a single live video appear on multiple Pages. Users will find the tool on Facebook's Publisher Tools section on Pages and in the Live API. An online article explains how to use the feature.
“The live cross-posting process is really simple and is the perfect solution for us to not only aggregate our views and engagement on live videos, but to also promote our show in Facebook Watch, Surfing Sundays," says Felipe Marcondes, social media manager for the World Surf League. "We cross-posted this recent live video to our main page, a sponsor's page, and one of our athlete's pages, and the results were great, with more than 1.5 million views, 4,500 shares, and over 538,000 minutes watched. We love that we can cross-post these videos and tag our other pages in the post. Looking forward to using this feature throughout the season.”
The third feature, live rewind, is still in the testing phase, but should be popular when it's released. With live rewind, viewers joining a live video in the middle will have the option to jump back and watch it from the start. Viewers could check out a highlight with live rewind, then go forward and watch the rest of the stream live.
Facebook will make live rewind available to all streamers when testing is completed.
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