Live streaming has plenty of benefits and one of them is generating a bigger audience. If you are a fan of the biggest social networking site, you would be happy to know that Facebook live broadcasting is now open to the masses.
Facebook Live Broadcasting is Now Open to Some Non-Verified Users
Facebook live broadcasting is not a new service. It has been around for four months, but it was only available for celebrities, public figures and other verified profiles. It is designed to rival Periscope and YouTube.
Today, Facebook has revealed that it is testing this feature with more people and starting with a smaller percentage of iOS users. It is only available in the US, though.
As regards to its availability to other countries, the social networking site has not given a timeframe yet. For the engineering team, it is not an easy thing to do.
Are you one of the select few?
If you notice the option “Live Video” on your Update Status dialog box, then you are one of those few people who could test Facebook live broadcasting.
Challenging
Live broadcasting for Facebook was a challenging one. The engineering team has to solve traffic spikes as public figures have millions of followers wanting to watch a video at once. Load balancing is the goal of the team.
The company started with a smaller group but with big audiences. From a business perspective, having influencers using this tool can surely generate better engagement and adoption.
Lowering the latency is the next goal of Facebook when it opens its live broadcasting to non-verified accounts. The company said that it has already lowered the latency by a few seconds through real time messaging protocol playback. It is a system that delivers on-demand, live media.
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With this system, Facebook live broadcasting will be sharpest and seamless on the market. Broadcasting is split into video and audio streams. And each of them is segmented into 4 KB chunks. These smaller chunks contribute to giving audiences smoother streaming and reducing latency.
Thundering Herd
It is a kind of problem that the Facebook engineering team had to deal with. Thundering Herd occurs when there are too many requests at once, thereby, overwhelming the entire system to the point that the live broadcasting will drop out or disconnect.
Another problem that the company will have to deal with is the interactions that will take place with comments, likes and more.
Video star
Facebook has been developing some tools for video creators. The live broadcasting is designed to rival YouTube and improve the amount of videos present on the site. Then again, the company did not reveal a timetable for the complete rollout of live broadcasting. If the testing phase would show positive results, it could surely happen in 2016.
On the other hand, if you are not one of those select few to try out Facebook live broadcasting, you can take advantage of the service’s collage feature. It allows you to organize photos and videos into a moving collage. It mimics that of Instagram Layout app. However, the movement is quite different.
Have you tried Facebook live broadcasting? How was it?
