Nigeria and 60 other countries can now get updated Facebook live videos. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, “Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world. This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together.”
Zuckerberg also, shared on his Facebook page, that the sweeping updates allow Live videos to be experienced in a variety of new ways: people can go Live in “Groups” or “Events”, there are five new filters to add flair to videos, and now people can discover Live events all over the world through Live Map and jump straight into those streams with a simple click. People can also send invites to their friends to watch their Live videos.
The Facebook community can interact directly with Live content even better as well: Live Reactions have also been added and now people can react in the moment to live videos as they do posts. Those comments remain synchronised with the videos and can be replayed along with the stream at a later date.
Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox hosted a live video session on Wednesday to announce the product and said Facebook hopes it will be used for everything from intimate family moments such as a baby’s first steps, celebrity-hosted question-and-answer sessions and breaking newscasts.
Mat Honan may have put it best in a Buzzfeed article on Tuesday: “And if you look way down the road, you can just begin to see a version of the future in which Facebook has emerged as the place to watch the kind of live events you might tune into a local or cable station to see.