Facebook Launches Watch Tab For Video Shows, Uses TV's 75-Year-Old Marketing Pitch (marketwatch.com) 40
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.
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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.
Slow day? (Score:1)
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I disagree. Did you know that all the people on this planet breathe O2? While this is true, it is not newsworthy.
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Actually that was pretty big news when they discovered the biochemistry behind respiration, it's just not newsworthy anymore.
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Then again, it was Facebook that did a naming faceplant on "Graph".
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No interest in watching age discrimination succeed (Score:1)
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FB uses cult psychology, so it's no shock they'd use that in the workplace too. It's easier to indoctrinate the young.
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So innovation on the internet nowadays... (Score:2)
...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:
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The progressives want to use television for more than information or entertainment. They want to use it to shape public opinion and guide society in the right direction. So they will have TV programming followed by a debate where those with those with the right ideas are supported and those with the wrong ones are corrected.
If you read any discussion about TV these days, you'll see everyone over 30 say they are tuning out and turning off because music is more about women shaking their asses and singing abou
Weird corollary (Score:2)
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...
Not Interested (Score:3)
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.
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I gave up on FM because of the incessant commercials 15 years ago. I tried again while on vacation, and it's definitely much worse. I don't know how anyone can manage to listen to the radio and not go insane. 25% of air time is commercials or inane talking. The music is overly compressed and every station plays the same songs. Over. And. Over.
Thankfully, one can get music without that crap easily.
TV isn't much better these days. If drug companies and law firms stopped advertising, most cable channels would
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Only 25%??!!?? Where do you live. Try using the radio during any normal time commute. I was counting before I quit listening. A 30 minute drive my play two songs. Listen for an hour, and you would hear those two songs again. I did learn a lot about the laughing hyena's bathroom habits, though.
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I like the randomness of radio surfing rather than me choosing a genre as with Spotify, but it is almost impossible to do these days.
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At least with cable TV you can DVR to skip commercials, or stream videos without commercials. I'd rather cancel my FB account that watch a single streaming commercial. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are so ad happy that I find I've largely lost the desire to visit them anymore.
I think they are just foaming at the mouth trying to increase their stock price that they'll try any dumb thing. Watching commercials are becoming an artifact of history for video. They are focusing on innovating the past instead of g
Fatal Flaw (Score:2)
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
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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.
Ummmm.... (Score:1)
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Don't care, not on Facebook.
I'm not either, but I'm interested in how FB seems to be trying to be the everything guy. And what happens when you try to please everyone...
This is only going to end in bloat and then user will look elsewhere. While FB is popular now, so have lots of things that now aren't. I think this approach to try and do everything will ultimately be the end of them.
Stop. (Score:2)
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.
Mountain View (Score:2)
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.
better hurry (Score:2)