Facebook has been very clear that it wants a share of the ever growing video streaming market. This market has been growing steadily with companies such as YouTube and Periscope dominating it. To grow in this market, Facebook has been changing its Live feed to give users the best experience and now allows them to live stream videos nonstop for 24 hours.
Allowing users to stream live video for 24 hours comes a few weeks after the Facebook Live was made available to all users as it was previously limited to a few influential figures.
Before today’s announcement, users could only stream live videos for just 90 minutes and this was enough for most people but Facebook wants to take that further to 24 hours. This can be attributed to increased competition in this market especially from YouTube. YouTube is the go to source for live stream and Facebook wants to change that by attracting people to use its site instead.
With the new changes in the length of Facebook Live videos, users will not be able to rewind the live streams when the broadcast is ongoing. This is not a big deal but can be very frustrating if you are watching a video and happen to miss something that has been said and you can’t rewind until the broadcast is over.
People are already on Facebook
Allowing extended live streams makes Facebook very competitive compared to YouTube. People are already spending time on Facebook and getting them to stream anything they want to the world is easier. Even with this, I do not see Facebook outshining YouTube just yet, the only people we are likely to see Live streaming on Facebook at the moment are celebrities and big brands. This is especially so for the long live streams, above 5 minutes. The rest would rather go with YouTube as it is specifically made for this and does it exceptionally well.
