Narrative: Live video is the next big thing
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Facebook to Stream 20 MLB Games on Friday Nights in 2017/8 Season (May 18, 2017)
Twitter already has a deal with Major League Baseball to stream some games, and now it appears Facebook has a similar arrangement. The latter will broadcast 20 Friday-night games throughout the season. Given other recent deals for major sports, including Twitter’s last year for Thursday night NFL games, that might sound like a lot, but of course there are 30 teams in the MLB, each of which plays 162 regular season games, which means that including the postseason there are nearly 2500 games in total each year, so Facebook will air less than 1% of the total. And I’m guessing Friday night games have among the lowest viewership of any games, so this feels like a low-risk proposition for MLB and an experiment at best for Facebook. For viewers, too, the chances that Facebook will be showing the one game your team is playing in any given Friday night will be slim. But this feels like a good step for Facebook as it both scales up its live broadcast offerings and feels out what the audiences will be like for sports on Facebook.
via FT
★ Twitter Announces a Dozen New Video Deals (May 1, 2017)
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★ Twitter Signs Deal for Custom 24/7 Channel with Bloomberg (May 1, 2017)
Last week, the day before Twitter’s earnings, it briefed BuzzFeed on its plans for 24/7 live video, and this week it’s announcing that it will achieve that objective at least in part through an expanded partnership with Bloomberg. But whereas Twitter has so far just carried the standard Bloomberg stream, this new partnership will have at least some exclusive content and also apparently a broader coverage than the existing, very business news-oriented, channel. As of when I’m writing, all the details aren’t out yet, but the channel is to begin airing sometime in the fall. This is an interesting partnership, but I reiterate what I said last week, which is that just having content is not the same as having compelling content, and even if there’s an exclusive element to this Bloomberg deal, business news or even news in general doesn’t quite fit the bill. I’m intrigued to see the details here, but as of right now I have a hard time seeing this make a big difference to Twitter’s smallish live video audience (just 14% of its monthly active users watched even 2 seconds of one live video last quarter), let alone its overall growth or ability to monetize its audience better.
Update (3:40pm MT): Bloomberg and Twitter have now announced some more details around the new channel, and it’s an interesting idea: become the breaking news network that takes what’s happening on Twitter and curates and verifies the information before feeding it out in a live TV show. Given how central Twitter is to the 24/7 news cycle already, I’m not convinced this is new and different, and if the emphasis here is on verification (certainly not a bad thing) it may actually mean the in-house network is slower to break news than CNN etc. One of the big problems with 24/7 news coverage is also always the challenge of filling time and keeping viewers engaged, which lends itself to sensationalism (to make unimportant stories seem important) and lots of filler material (because there’s never always something newsworthy going on). It’ll be interesting to see if Bloomberg and Twitter can collectively overcome these two, because otherwise we’re just getting yet another always-on news channel with little to differentiate it. The proof is totally going to be in the pudding with this one.
via WSJ
Facebook is Now Paying Companies to Produce Non-Live Video (Apr 22, 2017)
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One in five Facebook videos is Live as it seizes the verb – TechCrunch (Apr 6, 2017)
This is the first real quantification we’ve had of live video which puts it in context of Facebook’s overall video volumes, and on the face of it looks pretty good. For one fifth of all video shared on the platform to be live is impressive. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much video I see shared on Facebook by my own friends, but it’s not that much, so perhaps between regular users and brands and so on that makes a certain amount of sense. I’d be far more curious to know what percentage live makes up of video consumed on Facebook, because I suspect that’s a far smaller number, and arguably that number matters a lot more than what’s uploaded. After all, Facebook only really benefits from the viewing end of the equation.
via TechCrunch
Twitter targets tie-ups with pay-TV broadcasters in live video push – Telegraph (Apr 3, 2017)
This is an interesting next potential step in Twitter’s push into live video. So far it’s focused on licensing video to show to all visitors (or at least all visitors in a particular country), with one of the big selling points being that users don’t have to hunt through a channel guide, authenticate themselves through a pay TV service, or jump through other hoops. What Twitter is betting on now is that users might be willing to authenticate themselves through a pay TV provider in return for the smaller benefit of watching video and related tweets in a single window, something I’m not sure users will go for. Twitter has, at least, made that tweet curation experience better in recent months, which may increase the attractiveness somewhat, but I suspect a big attraction for the other live video Twitter has shown was that it was free and painless. As anyone who’s used other TVE solutions knows, those words generally don’t apply.
via Telegraph
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and YouTube are bidding to stream the NFL’s Thursday night games – Recode (Mar 24, 2017)
When Twitter won these rights last time around in their first year as a separate set from television rights, it turned out to be something very different from what many of us expected. Rather than a massive splurge on a very valuable set of rights, it turned out that the winner merely got the right to show the games along with advertising mostly already sold by broadcasters, meaning there was very little additional revenue opportunity, and as such Twitter got the rights for a paltry $10 million. These NFL games have actually been a good fit with Twitter’s overall live strategy, which has mostly been focused on winning audiences rather than lots of new revenue, but it seems others are interested in taking another crack this year. It would obviously fit well with Facebook’s recent push into professionally produced live video, but also with YouTube’s recent investment in e-sports rights and with Amazon’s foray into TV bundles and Twitch video streaming. It’s less of a good fit with Apple’s current focus in the TV space, so it’s not surprising that its name doesn’t appear here. I’ll be very interested to see if the NFL is pitching the same kind of package as last time or whether the winning bidder will have the right to sell more of its own ads this time around.
via Recode
YouTube makes its biggest e-sports bet with FACEIT streaming deal – Reuters (Mar 16, 2017)
E-sports are one of the few where the TV and digital rights aren’t sewn up for years to come, and so they’ve become a battleground for big digital players, with Amazon buying Twitch and YouTube now stealing one of its most high-profile, high-quality content deals. This is a big step for YouTube, which has dabbled with various bits of live sports in the past but has never had a really high-profile deal. It’s obviously not going to deliver NFL-like viewing numbers, but it’s a good test of YouTube’s commitment to live video and sports.
via Reuters
Facebook’s livestreaming strategy looks a lot like Twitter’s livestreaming strategy – Recode (Mar 14, 2017)
In my Techpinions Insiders post last week, I wrote about Facebook and Twitter’s respective live video strategies, and argued that this is one area where Twitter might actually be executing on the better strategy, namely focusing on existing high quality live video rather than trying to force user-generated content. This piece today confirms the conclusion of my piece in which I said Facebook should probably be doing more of this kind of thing. However, I also said that it was still unclear how well Twitter was monetizing the video it was licensing, given that most of the ads had already been sold by the original owners. The other challenge, as this piece makes clear, is that the video owners willing to partner with Twitter in this way are mostly those either with small audiences they’re keen to grow, or whose distribution isn’t the primary way they monetize, which tends to mean it isn’t the best or most exciting live content available. Meanwhile, the most compelling live video – major sports – remains largely off limits to online-only broadcasters. That’s not to say Facebook couldn’t bid for NFL rights as Twitter did last year, but those Thursday night games are such a tiny slice of the overall sports schedule in the US that it’s hard to see how it could be a central plank of an overall live video strategy.
via Recode
In Rush to Live Video, Facebook Moved Fast and Broke Things – WSJ (Mar 6, 2017)
There’s some really good reporting here, and it reinforces my sense that Facebook’s live video push hasn’t panned out the way it would have wanted despite its massive investment. I continue to believe that mass market live video has very limited appeal, largely because most of us don’t spend most of our time in situations which are worthy of (or appropriate for) broadcasting to our hundreds of friends. Yes, there are occasions when user-generated live video is uniquely placed to offer something no other medium can, but those are rare and not the basis for a widely used mainstream product. It’s still intriguing to me to see Facebook push so hard for individuals to share and consume amateur video, while Twitter has balanced its Periscope investment with a focus on high quality professional live video, including sports – easily the most compelling form of live content around for most users. This is one area where Twitter’s strategy feels smarter than Facebook’s, and it’s therefore not that surprising that Facebook seems to be experimenting more with live sports video as well.
via WSJ