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Facebook Launches Watch Tab For Video Shows, Uses TV's 75-Year-Old Marketing Pitch (marketwatch.com)
From a report: Facebook's push toward original video content will take a big step forward Thursday with the launch of a new section, dubbed Watch. The new tab, which Facebook FB, said late Wednesday will launch for a limited number of U.S. users for now, will feature about 40 original series, with plans to eventually scale up to hundreds of shows. Facebook said it will become available to more users in the coming weeks. The Mountain View, Calif., social network is hoping to tap into lucrative TV advertising revenue to boost its ever-expanding bottom line. If successful, Watch could stem the ad-load slowdown for the rest of the year that Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned about last month when Facebook filed its quarterly earnings. Facebook also hopes the Watch tab will open up a new method of advertising that doesn't clutter users' News Feeds, and keep its 2 billion users on its site longer. Company's founder Mark Zuckerberg is understandably very excited about the move. He says the company believes "it's possible to rethink a lot of experiences through the lens of building community -- including watching video. Watching a show doesn't have to be passive. It can be a chance to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things." If that pitch sounds familiar to you, it's because TV has been doing it for more than 75 years.
Anything a platform, used by over 2 billion people, with several more services, that are individually used by over a billion of people, does is newsworthy.
I thought the summary was strange too, but I took it as Facebook's reaction to more realtime comments showing up in YouTube and other video providers. (Even some of my pirate streams offer a chat window now.)
It's "new" because it's likely aimed at Millennials and younger. Gen-X'ers like me (and older) could give a shit what anyone else thinks while they're watching their favorite show since most of us have used TV at one point or another to AVOID interacting with the people around us.
Ten years ago, if Facebook announced it was adding "Watch" people would have asked "WTF do they need to add a clock for?"
Then again, it was Facebook that did a naming faceplant on "Graph".
No respect for any company that refuses to hire over 29 year olds
...consists of turning it into television. Everybody (ISPs, especially) seems to want to do this now and it's pretty pathetic that these innovators can't think up something more original. But... it sort of goes hand in hand with the kind of innovative programming one finds on television (or coming out of Hollywood).
Maybe Ursula Le Guin was on to something:
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
FB uses cult psychology, so it's no shock they'd use that in the workplace too. It's easier to indoctrinate the young.
Videos scraped from YouTube and reposted on Facebook.
Hey, kind of like human society in general.
Saying that, this is certainly not how I experienced television when I used to watch it. Interactions went a little more like...
I cut the cord a couple of years ago and primarily watch Netflix or Amazon Prime video. Both contain commercial-free content which I am happy to pay for. I do watch TV (over the air) occasionally and the commercials are so pathetically mind numbing that I can't stand them. I often wonder who they are pandering to because I find them so offensive. Which brings me to my point, I won't be watching any streaming crap that contains ads or commercials. So good luck with that facebook.
That may be true for engineers and management. Everything else is outsourced. Outsourced contractors are more interested in finding warm bodies. I had a weekend job as PC disconnect/reconnect for a moving company in 2011, doing a half-dozen assignments at Facebook's Palo Alto locations. I was 42 at the time.
Facebook's video play has a massive fatal flaw. If the video loses focus, it automatically pauses. Yup, this means absolutely ZERO multi-tasking at all. You're forced to watch the video and nothing else. This is especially frustrating when having multiple monitors. I do a lot of batch work which requires interaction once every 20 seconds or so to launch a new script. It is easy for me to watch a video and keep an eye on the production screen at the same time. Simply clicking on that second window kills the video I was watching on FB.
Most of the videos I'd be watching through FB are individual's streaming doing creative things like DIY tutorials n shit. With both YouTube and Twitch being more user-friendly streaming services, this absolutely kills the desire to even touch FB's streaming options.
They're not QUITE there yet, but Pluto TV is kind of like this. I found it on my Roku and was impressed. They take a bunch of content from various websites and create channels and a programming schedule from it, and then present it to you much like a cable TV schedule is laid out. It's possible to flip channels like the old analog cable boxes would let you do. The content is mostly crap, but the presentation and idea are fantastic.
Actually that was pretty big news when they discovered the biochemistry behind respiration, it's just not newsworthy anymore.
Don't care, not on Facebook.
Just Stop.
We didn't want disney to do it's own network, we barely tolerate hulu which is consumer-antagonistic in its practices.
There's a reason a lot of us have deleted our facebook accounts, and that's because facebook does a piss poor job of managing its feed as-is. If you think this sort of gimmick will bring us back, you're wrong.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
The Mountain View, Calif., social network is hoping to tap into lucrative TV advertising revenue to boost its ever-expanding bottom line
Facebook is not based in Mountain View. I suspect you confused with another California-based GAFA.
Too much clutter, too much video, too many massive pictures when it's meant to be a plain text update. A single non-scrolling page is all they get from me now