Facebook Launches Watch, a Video Platform for Original Shows

Eager to compete with social video platforms like YouTube and Snapchat, Facebook announced the launch of Watch last week, a new platform for original

Subscription News: Facebook Launches Watch

Source: Facebook

Eager to compete with social video platforms like YouTube and Snapchat, Facebook announced the launch of Watch last week, a new platform for original shows. Soon to be available on mobile devices, through TV apps and on desktops and laptops, Watch shows are made up of episodes that are either live or recorded and that follow a theme or story. Facebook says each user’s experience will be personalized, helping them discover new shows that their friends and communities are watching.

Facebook users will have a Watchlist to alert them to new shows. They’ll also be sorted for easy searching in categories like New This Week, Most Talked About, What’s Making People Laugh, What Friends Are Watching, Latest Episodes. Users can watch shows, comment on them and share them with their Facebook friends.

 a Video Platform for Original Shows

Source: Facebook

According to the announcement, the Watch platform will be open to creators and publishers who want to build an audience, or grow an existing one, and earn money for their original work. Facebook said it believes shows like Nas Daily, a daily program where creator Nas makes one-minute videos with fans from around the world, will do well on the Watch platform. Nas Daily has more than 1.8 million likes and more than 1.9 million followers. Among Facebook’s partners is Major League Baseball which will broadcast one game live each week.

Facebook has also funded some series for Watch, including Returning the Favor, a show hosted by Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe in which candidates who do extraordinary things for their communities are nominated by Rowe’s Facebook fans. Rowe chooses which stories to share and then does something extraordinary for those featured.

For now, Watch is in beta, only available to a limited group of users in the U.S. Shows will soon be made available to a limited group of creators, says Facebooks. As part of Watch, Facebook is also introducing Show Pages, so that it is easy to create a Facebook show and publish new episodes to the Watch platform.

‘We think creating a show has a number of benefits, like the ability to reach a predictable and loyal audience. People will be able to follow the shows they like, and when there’s a new episode of a show, Facebook will inform the show’s followers and the episode will automatically appear in their Watchlist in Watch,’ said Nick Grudin, VP of media partnerships for Facebook.

‘Over time, creators will be able to monetize their shows through Ad Breaks. We’ve been testing Ad Breaks over the past few months, and we will be slowly opening up availability to more creators to ensure we’re providing a good experience for the community. Creators can also create sponsored shows using our branded content tag,’ Grudin added.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook creators will earn 55 percent of ad break revenue, while Facebook gets the remaining 45 percent.

On August 9, Mark Zuckerburg wrote about the new platform and his hope for it:

Subscription News: Facebook Launches Watch

Source: Facebook

Nieman Lab says that publishers including The Atlantic, Business Insider, Quartz and Mashable are early partners for Facebook’s Watch platform.

Insider Take:

You know how we feel about innovation – we love it – but Facebook has had limited success with other initiatives like Instant Articles, so we hope that before Watch is fully launched, that is properly tested. From a publisher’s perspective, this is an exciting opportunity to utilize a multi-media platform with revenue-earning potential, though publishers could use their own platforms – or existing platforms – to have the same benefits without sharing 45 percent of advertising revenue.

What Facebook brings to the table, however, are deep pockets with plenty of R&D money and 1.32 billion daily active users (in June 2017). If the goal is to introduce original video content to users where they already are every day – Facebook – then Watch could be a big success. We’ll reserve judgment for now. We want to see how it actually works first and how publishers respond to the newest Facebook experiment.

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