Facebook's live video streaming feature, which started with celebrities able to use the feature in August 2015, began to be rolled out to iOS users in December 2015 before a wider launch in January. Facebook has also recently said that Facebook Live will soon be made available for Android users.
Facebook Live works like Periscope and Meerkat, which are live-streaming apps that allow users to share videos to their friends in real time. Facebook Live users will see how many other users are watching, and will see comments as they are posted. Once the live stream is finished, the video is saved as a traditional video on the user's timeline.
According to a post on the Facebook Newsroom, Facebook Live has grown in popularity as more users and Pages are creating and watching live-streaming videos on the social network.
To better understand the signals to help the social network in showing relevant live videos to users and how to rank them in the News Feed, Facebook will be making adjustments to the algorithm of the News Feed so that Facebook Live videos will likely appear higher while they are live compared to when they have been converted into traditional videos. This reveals that Facebook is now treating live videos as a new type of content, and not bundled up along with the traditional videos being uploaded to the social network.
Pushing Facebook Live videos up the News Feeds of users is also important so that more people would be watching them. The post noted that users spend over triple the time in watching a Facebook Live video compared to when the video has already been transformed into a traditional video as the event has concluded. The change would also allow for more users to send in their comments to the Facebook Live broadcaster while the video is streaming live.
According to the post, Facebook implemented a similar adjustment to the social network's News Feed a few years ago when users began to share and watch videos on the platform. Facebook decided to update the rankings on News Feeds to determine the number of users who watched a video, along with the length of time spent in watching them, to better understand the preference of users in which videos to watch.
