Facebook Live Want You to Watch Video When it's Best for You

Tech Crunch

Sometimes when you're watching a particularly long video or a stream after it's finished, you do just want to know when it gets good. Facebook have decided that Live should address that and they're introducing engagement graphs on finished streams.

These engagement graphs will sit at the bottom of the video and will appear to be emoji on different levels. These emoji are the reactions to the video and the higher it sits, the more common that reaction was. So for the funniest bits, you might look for the smiling reaction, whereas if you want to see something that made people mad, you'd look for the angry emoji. It's simple to understand and it means that you don't have to sit through a whole stream if you don't have long and someone wants you to watch something.

This Live feature makes the Facebook service a little less so, but it was something that they had to do. More people are watching streams after they've ended. It's the whole reason Periscope gave users the ability to save their streams recently. Facebook users have been able to save their streams from the off and this new graph kind of makes it look like Facebook and Periscope are dipping in and out of each other's features, altering them slightly to seem new like the appearance of the graph on the Facebook streams rather than users just seeing the reactions after the fact. You will still see those reactions and comments if you watched a finished stream, but that is only just being rolled out on Facebook as well.

As more and more people continue to watch streams after a fact, both services will have to change. Facebook's graph will mean that users will have to make their stream work so that they do have moments of humour, climaxes and everything that anything recorded for an audience is supposed to have. No one is going to want to watch a stream where someone just talks about nothing in particular for an hour, but if they perform it like a stand-up comedian, then they could make it work. Same goes for skits with storylines and so on. The interesting thing is this is not what's doing well on Facebook Live right now. The watermelon smashing video might have had some sort of structure, but it was still kind of open and then you had the Chewbacca masked lady that didn't have much of a point. Even if this doesn't do well for Facebook Live, it might encourage the other streaming companies to follow suit and do the same.

This update should be a practical one for Facebook Live, but it is questionable as to whether it'll have the effect that they expect it to.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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