Facebook is mental about live video, and the streams popping up in your feed are going to start looking wacky to match.
On Wednesday, the world’s biggest social network said it would roll out a bunch of new features to its Facebook Live streaming. Some features mimic elements of Periscope, the live-streaming app from rival Twitter, and others ape the millennial fave Snapchat.
A new “live reactions” element will let viewers pop animated emoji — the same dancing pictograms for feels like Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry that it widened from its simple Like button last month — over a video. It’s similar to the floating hearts that pepper a Periscope stream. Reminiscent of Snapchat, Facebook’s coming “Doodling” feature will let broadcasters draw on their video while streaming.
Facebook has been pouring attention into its Facebook Live streaming arm, part of the company’s overall obsession with amping up video. It has massaged its algorithms to lift more live video to the top of visitors’ news feed, and it was on a campaign to recruit celebrities to stream more. Top execs, including founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, regularly stream live themselves, such as Zuckerberg’s intro last week to the company’s Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.
The company’s aggressiveness on video is aimed at making itself a pre-eminent place for video on the Internet, taking on Google’s YouTube and positioning itself as a digital-age television alternative. Its massive audience of more than 1.5 billion users and its power over what they seem has quickly lifted videos views to more than 8 billion a day and 100 million hours of watched daily.
The new features announced Wednesday also included new ways to find and share live streams. Broadcasters can target particular viewers by streaming live video to a specific Facebook group or event. Viewers can invite a friend to watch with them, and if you view a recorded version of a stream after it’s ceased to be live, the comments that occurred during the broadcast will scroll as they did in real time.
And like on Facebook’s own Instagram app, Facebook Live will have five filters to alter the look of videos.
The company is also adding a hub page for live video, and a map with dots wherever a stream is live.