Video is not front and center on Facebook. It’s a tiny link in the sidebar of a member’s homepage that many hardly notice. They are probably more familiar with the random videos from friends that sort of pop up in their News feeds. Often those videos are from YouTube, but increasingly they are hosted on Facebook itself. In fact, since Facebook launched its own internal video feature in 2007, 45 million videos have been uploaded. About 100,000 are added every day. And that is for a feature that is practically hidden.
Today, Facebook is making some improvements to its video-sharing service. The quality will be bumped up to 720p, which is technically the low end of HD. Coincidentally (or not), YouTube turned on an HD-quality option on Friday.
The key change, though, is that the videos will now be embeddable on other sites. This is also something that has been a standard for a long time at YouTube, MySpace, and practically every other video site. But Facebook is adding a privacy twist. Just as on Facebook, you can determine exactly who can see any video you upload. Those privacy settings will be maintained across the Web. Anyone will be able to see public videos. But if you set it so that only your friends can see it, the video won’t play unless those friends are currently logged into Facebook.
Given the sheer scale of Facebook, making videos embeddable will no doubt give its video efforts a much needed boost, especially if people just embed public videos. But will it be enough for Facebook to close the video gap with arch-competitor MySpace, and maybe even nip at YouTube’s heels?
October, 2008, comScore Video Metrix:
| Company | MySpace | YouTube | |
| Unique video viewers | 7 million | 51 million | 344 million |
| Videos Streamed | 21 million | 411 million | 5.3 billion |
| Total Minutes Watched | 32 million | 449 million | 12.3 billion | Avg. videos/viewer | 3 | 8 | 53 |
wow facebook, awesome plan.
take everything on the internet that is already not making money, and make your own version of it.
brilliant.
That is funny… And so true. I can just hear the discussion “Let’s take a negative gross margin business and try to scale it”
will youtube allow fb embeds on its site. business wants to upload once and be able to embed anywhere especially on the most popular video sites. the value is in how businesses will utilize video embed innovation to promote there business.
Well said
Who’s bright idea was this? Facebook must be the most poorly managed web company out their!
yer spellng sux dude
Everyone’s a critic. You don’t think Facebook took the costs into account before they decided to launch this?
They’re not idiots. It’s clearly a strategic decision of some kind, and they’re aware of the risks, costs, and tradeoffs. Sheesh.
I have a video with Chris Putnam who runs the video team at Facebook here: http://www.fast...leases-hd-video
Awesome interview; Thanks for sharing! I watched all 16 minutes.
I see more value on facebook apps, f-connect then video module!
Videos increases facebook operational costs, effects speed of the site and mainly i dont see how they can make money out of it!
As facebook user, i dont see any real use of this module!
Chandra
http://www.myjil.com
Watch Scoble’s video. I just watched it and Putnam is very thorough and Scoble does a great job digging into the tech side of FB video. I am still pumped from watching it.
One step closer to being myspace. Next up, Music and homepage customization.
Great reporting TechCrunchahoofacebookspaceoogle!
…itter!
Hmmm, lets hope that video quality *maybe* could impact the average video *content’s* quality. Not too hopeful though.
I’d love to see the live element (ustream, livevideo, qik, etc.) integrated into facebook. That would take the most social social-networking site to the next level.
I think that as social networking continues to evolve they will allow more and more segmentation of what information you allow each of your connections to see. I think its great and gives the power and control back to the user.
Kevin
http://www.kidsdesk.net
Boooya Putnam ftw!
Based on this news source entirely, I can see this becoming a huge frustration when people start posting content on other sites without ‘public’ permissions (possibly by accident even)… In which the rest of the world outside of thier walled-garden just gets annoyed at the ‘elitism’ of it all… But it could bear some interesting fruit nevertheless!
It is a good idea..and you can make money off video if people did it right…simple profit sharing. Each user should be allowed to pick from a list of sponsored sites and then at the bottom underneath the player would be a single link with maybe a popup bubble description on rollover. Any profit made by clicks 50% goes to who made the video, 50% goes to Facebook. If I made a video I would just link to a site I liked that was in the sponsor list.
The links YouTube uses in the video are annoying. Did it ever occur to advertisers that annoying people which is what putting something in the way of content does, doesn’t exactly motivate users to click links? It pisses them off.
I will annoy you into buying my products…plus most youtube links look like spammy crap links..has anyone ever heard of linking ads to decent websites…
I think it will slow down the site performance and expand to many war on the cyberspace.
It definently will just make things that much more confusing for the casual facebook user and slow down the actual pace of socializing on facebook. Im all for privacy but too much privacy just hinders the fact that you are on a social site socializing.
Steve
grindvision.com
Now this is news I can get excited about.
Cool beans!!!
Nice nice
Very interesting, I wonder if this will make videos more prevalent on Facebook.
it didnt suprise me because of
http://www.eskibirsaat.com
I also would like to see some live elements to this service ( Ustream, Qik ). It would be great to be able to live stream with friends on Facebook.
I actually seriously dont see the use for such an embeddable feature, cauz i probably want my frends to see it and would just send them a link instead of embedding it.
How ever nice feature. You never know i might actually use it @_@
Well done, Putnam.
I don’t see the added value
its nice to have HD video feature.. is it possible to post/call video through fb connect?
word
Nice feature for friends
It’s just awesome to have HD video now but I wish they had an option to replace existing video. I don’t really want to delete my old videos and re-upload them. This would ruin the links & timestamps on the videos.
Interesting UI design when a user wants to cancel a video upload: http://bildr.no/view/299914
Very cool.
I think facebook should improve the video streaming system because most of the time it slow down my PC while playing a shared video. I’ve no broadband issue from my ISP.
You can only embed YOUR OWN VIDEOS.
I was able to embed one one of my own videos on my blog, in HD:
Facebook : White Squirrel at Jamaica Pond, Jamaica Plain, MA (HD)
http://offonata...maica-pond.html
I was only able to embed someone else’s video by installing a Greasemonkey script in Firefox:
Christmas Time Is Here from A Charlie Brown Christmas by Graham English
http://offonata...om-charlie.html
I see no embed code available on someone else’s video.
The Facebook blog says:
“You’ll also be able to take videos you’ve added to Facebook and embed them on other websites.”
http://blog.fac...blog_id=company
Once more thing, the play button at the bottom right of the video doesn’t do anything.
You have to click inside the video.
Facebook thinks if you can go to there to get everything done that it will slowly chip away at every other service out there and be a one stop shop.
It’s the only bet that Facebook can actually make, really. It’s existence alone is proof of Myspace’s mistake in thinking it can just be Myspace for the sake of Myspace and still keep people entertained.
Basically, Facebook can do it, and has time to do it slowly. So by the time new users come to Facebook they’ll have so many features already involved that the new people wont need services like youtube and flickr.
Glad to see more platforms upgrading their video capabilities to HD. Looking forward to playing with the the Facebook embedding too.
Well these social networking sites always come up with something or the other. Maybe they know people are dead bored. Anyways all i can say is that i have given up socail networking. May start it in a few months or so. But till then adios amigos
Ah, finally. Facebook Video on TechCrunch.
Yeah, only what, a year and a half after launch?
I like that this really shows off that “dynamic privacy” buzzword I keep hearing about.
Yes, the privacy feature is the bigger news story, in my opinion. Sure, Facebook is late in the game to embedding content, but the fact that your privacy settings on Facebook now travel to other sites is a huge plus.
为什么facebook还不是很重视视频呢？
I have seen videos emerging on facebook in recent months, took a while..
Great to see Facebook getting serious with its video application…They are surpassing their social network rivals in every aspect.
I always wonder how you manage to write a digg-front-page story!
- mani
ExcuseMeWorld.com
dont worry be happy
http://www.eskibirsaat.com
I uploaded a HD video of my brothers wedding some while ago using a song by Air and it got stripped away for copyright infringement with a menace to get my account closed. How social is that? Will people take the risk of uploading personal videos, most of them using copyrighted music, when they can get their account closed? Personnally I won’t allthough the tool is pretty usefull for people with HD cameras.
I’ll let you in on a secret.
Upload your video to Metacafe, and then embed it onto your Facebook profile by using the Facebook app called “Posted Items Pro”.
In regards to putting personal videos with copyrighted music, surely it is perfectly fine if you credit the author of the song in the video?
It appears you can’t embed Facebook HD quality, at least not that I know yet — I was searching around and Facebook embeds appear to be regular quality.