{"id":5479,"date":"2015-03-26T11:58:26","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T18:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/?p=5479"},"modified":"2016-05-16T19:00:54","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T02:00:54","slug":"video-on-facebook-is-getting-better-but-its-missing-one-key-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/video-on-facebook-is-getting-better-but-its-missing-one-key-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Video on Facebook is Getting Better, But It&#8217;s Missing One Key Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_5500\" style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5500\" src=\"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/facebook-f8-2015.jpg\" alt=\"Facebook&#039;s F8 Conference. Photo courtesy developers.facebook.com.\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5500\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-5500\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Facebook&#8217;s F8 Conference. Photo courtesy <a href=\"https:\/\/developers.facebook.com\/blog\/post\/2015\/03\/25\/F8_2015_Roundup\/\">developers.facebook.com<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Video hosted and shared on Facebook is changing.<\/p>\n<p>While Facebook has been a valuable marketing tool for films and filmmakers <a href=\"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/how-to-use-facebook-film\/\">since 2008<\/a> when they rolled out Facebook Film (since re-named), Facebook has still been considered a &#8220;walled garden&#8221; that&#8217;s painful to search and continues to play catch-up to <em>many<\/em> other video delivery networks.<\/p>\n<p>At the first of two days of the F8 Conference, Facebook announced a few worthwhile upgrades that are relevant to filmmakers and, more specifically, anyone uploading video within Facebook <em>instead of<\/em> embedding or linking another video (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what caught our eye in <a href=\"http:\/\/media.fb.com\/2015\/03\/25\/updates-to-facebook-video-api\/\">yesterday&#8217;s announcement<\/a> on brand-new ways to use video on Facebook:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Until yesterday&#8217;s announcement, video uploaded to Facebook was not embeddable on other websites; now it is (<a href=\"https:\/\/developers.facebook.com\/docs\/plugins\/embedded-video-player\">documentation<\/a>); it&#8217;s unclear if embed views count toward the view counter<\/li>\n<li>You can now &#8220;set an expiration date for a video and retain insights after takedown (currently in beta),&#8221; which might be a creative tool for filmmakers and other video content providers (read: advertisers)<\/li>\n<li>As of yesterday, you can &#8220;restrict the audience of a video by age, gender, and location,&#8221; which opens up a whole can of worms for why one might do that<\/li>\n<li>Playing catch-up with YouTube (which allows only its verified users &#8212; a fairly easy process) to pick their own video&#8217;s poster frame, Facebook now allows you to &#8220;add custom thumbnails for videos&#8221; rather than getting stuck with a random frame grab<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a punch-list to get up to speed on how video on Facebook can help filmmakers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Facebook recently provided an optional &#8220;call to action&#8221; after a video ends, allowing some choice over what to do next (<a href=\"http:\/\/media.fb.com\/best-practice\/facebook-video\/\">source<\/a>); they also work for Facebook Pages and include &#8220;Book Now,&#8221; &#8220;Contact Us,&#8221; &#8220;Use App,&#8221; &#8220;Play Game,&#8221; &#8220;Shop Now,&#8221; &#8220;Sign Up,&#8221; and &#8220;Watch Video&#8221; &#8212; all of which allow for leaving Facebook (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/news\/call-to-action-button\">source<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>As of December 2014, Facebook has a department called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/fbmediaenglish\">Facebook Media<\/a>, which promotes the movers and shakers (or business partners?) using Facebook for video<\/li>\n<li>As of December 2014, video began to auto-play while muted (<a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2014\/12\/24\/facebook-videos\/\">source, 12\/24\/2014<\/a>); this was followed soon after by 15-second auto-playing video advertisements (<a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2014\/03\/13\/facebook-launches-video-ads\/\">source, 3\/13\/2014<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>As of December 2014, select Facebook Pages can feature a video front-and-center and also have YouTube-esque playlists (<a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2014\/12\/24\/facebook-videos\/\">Source, 12\/24\/2014<\/a>) but it&#8217;s a very slow roll-out for public, non-partner Facebook accounts; this may be fast-tracked in yesterday&#8217;s announcement, which says &#8220;manage featured videos and playlists for a Page&#8221; (<a href=\"http:\/\/media.fb.com\/2015\/03\/25\/updates-to-facebook-video-api\/\">source, 3\/24\/2015<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>As of May 2014, Facebook began to roll out Video Insights, which show retention per second and other stats (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/news\/Coming-Soon-Video-Metrics\">source<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally, in rare circumstances, some filmmakers or film companies may be invited to participate in &#8220;Facebook Live,&#8221; which is essentially a comment box alongside a live-streamed video but isn&#8217;t a feature that&#8217;s available to the general public:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Back in 2008, Facebook featured a creative project by <a href=\"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/experiments-with-social-viewing\/\">Spike Jonze<\/a><\/li>\n<li>While there&#8217;s now a lot more competition in social viewing experiences (e.g. uStream, LiveStream, etc.), they&#8217;ve just recently had video-specific live events for the <a href=\"http:\/\/media.fb.com\/2015\/02\/23\/the-87th-academy-awards-on-facebook\/\">2015 Academy Awards<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/media.fb.com\/success-story\/hbos-game-of-thrones\/\">Game of Thrones Season 4<\/a> and now Season 5 (aka watching the red carpet premiere), which essentially provided a mini-feed alongside the live-streaming video player<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But what&#8217;s wrong with all of the above? <em>Show me the money.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s still missing from Facebook is monetization. Facebook &#8220;likes&#8221; and &#8220;views&#8221; may appear to be good, but still not in the pocketbook.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The new stuff looks great but at the moment it&#8217;s vaporware. There&#8217;s a huge ecosystem around YouTube,&#8221; notes Daniel Keywan Hollister, who works at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocketjump.com\/\">RocketJump<\/a> and is a co-founder of <a href=\"http:\/\/5secondfilms.com\/\">5-second Films<\/a>. (By ecosystem, that&#8217;s referencing the search, users, money, and services that YouTube provides.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If we got a ton of views on Facebook and then those people didn&#8217;t watch it on YouTube, we&#8217;ll have lost money and the view count. We may put stuff on Facebook if we can still monetize it the same and whatnot, but there&#8217;s still so much more than just that over the last few years, especially for bigger channels like RocketJump. There&#8217;s a lot of merit to the &#8216;long tail&#8217; effect and having our stuff everywhere, but there&#8217;s also a huge value to being a juggernaut on YouTube even if we&#8217;re nowhere else.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Any thoughts on Facebook&#8217;s move with video that may help or hurt filmmakers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Video hosted and shared on Facebook is changing. While Facebook has been a valuable marketing tool for films and filmmakers since 2008 when they rolled out Facebook Film (since re-named), Facebook has still been considered a &#8220;walled garden&#8221; that&#8217;s painful to search and continues to play catch-up to many other video delivery networks. At the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6056,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions\/6056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fwdlabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}