Use cases for live-streaming apps are evolving. From the self-absorbed endeavour of broadcasting oneself to the world to sharing live, somber incident reports to newsrooms, the possibilities for livestreams are widening and Facebook wants a share of this pie when it’s baked. The company is starting off this drive with an elaborate experiment, it seems.
Vadim Lavrusik, Product manager Facebook, announced today that the company was launching a service that allows celebrities broadcast live streams to their fans on Facebook.
“Starting today, public figures can share live videos from Facebook Mentions, the app that makes it easy for influencers to talk with their fans and each other,” Vadim said.
It’s not clear what Facebook is calling the service, but Vadim suggests the app may be called Live after all. “Live is an immersive and authentic way to connect with the public figures you care about, in real-time,” says Vadim.
A relatively late entrant into a space Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope are already dominating, the Facebook service will work off the back of Facebook Mentions, an app that came out of Facebook’s creative labs in mid-July claiming to make it easier for celebrities to connect with their fans. The concept was a little fuzzy at the time. As far as we knew, celebrities were already connecting with fans via Fan pages. How much easier could it get? With the introduction of Live, however, it all seem to be coming to a head.
Facebook Mentions now appears to be an elaborate infrastructure that came waaay before the actual product.
Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Serena Williams, Michael Buble’ and a few others are artistes that Facebook says will be streaming on the app over the coming weeks.
As of now, the platform seems to be exclusive to celebrities, but it takes only little imagination to see where Facebook is going with this. When it finally becomes available across the platform, the chances of success for Facebook are more than decent. Its 1.49 billion user base not the least of the reasons why.
Facebookers can catch live videos from celebrities on their news feeds and watching a stream doesn’t seem to require an extra app download.
