Facebook goes Live with videos

Credit: AP Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook wants you to go Live.

In a direct assault on Twitter’s live-streaming prowess, Facebook is rolling out the ability for all its 1.5 billion users to launch live videos on their timelines and added a slew of new features to encourage everyone to be a broadcaster.

Facebook Live lets users stream real-time video in Groups and Events. Users can share live streams with their family or a workout plan with their fitness group, for instance.­ Live in Events, according to Facebook, means users can go live from a birthday party to allow those who couldn’t make it to join in the fun.

Not only can you now broadcast live, but viewers can react live as well, clicking on reactions such as Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry,­ giving broadcasters and other viewers­ a sense of how people are feeling during the live feed.

“It’s like hearing the crowd applaud­ and cheer,” wrote Fidji Simo, the social network’s Product Management Director, on the company blog.

A live streaming experience is no small technological feat, let alone the challenges of bringing that feed to the masses, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself discovered yesterday when his live demo conked out and reverted­ to an 8-second clip of a gray couch.

Zuckerberg has had a keen interest in making live video the future of the social network, recently saying in a town hall-style event in Berlin that it was one of the features he was “most excited about.”

Live strikes at the heart of many social network competitors, not the least of which is Snapchat. Much like the millennial-flavored video messaging app, Live will eventually allow users to doodle little markings atop their streaming faces.

Facebook Live poses a huge problem for Twitter, which purchased its rival Periscope in an attempt­ to carve out a new niche in live video last year. As Twitter has become less egalitarian, you’d be hard-pressed to see another Arab Spring reflected as prominently in those 140-character bursts today.

There’s a populist void, and Facebook can fill it.

Live allows anyone with a smartphone and Wi-Fi signal to broadcast from unseen corners of the world, giving citizen journalism a new unprecedented channel.

Beyond homespun broadcasters, Facebook has made no secret that it wants a piece of the news media’s pie. In fact, the network plans to pay select news publishers in exchange for broadcasting directly on Live instead­ of their own websites.

Live Facebook videos also provide business and political leaders,­ as well as celebrities, with an incred­ible opportunity to go straight to the viewer. Facebook has a mobile app called “Mentions” that only celebrities and public figures with verified profiles can use. As those users increasingly use the live stream feature, we’ll start to see major breaking local, political and worldwide news — unfiltered and raw — on Facebook first.