For this In Depth segment, we offer our predictions for what will happen over the next year in live video. This is your Ready Take Live: In-Depth, and What To Expect in 2018.
In 2017 we saw live video everywhere, and live will continue its run into 2018. The two major areas of growth I see coming are with social media giants Instagram and Twitter.
Instagram released its live streaming feature in 2017, but it is currently mobile only and only viewable inside Instagram Stories. We received a lot of calls for Instagram Live productions over the past year, and we reviewed the only way to switch a professional multi-camera live show with graphics to this mobile-only platform. It’s a huge pain for us, but a huge opportunity for Instagram to grow.
Facebook already has a working professional API, so in 2018 I expect Instagram to open up its platform to allow live streams from professional encoders. But for now we’ll have to wait and see, as the company has not released any information or plans to improve the live user experience.
Twitter on the other hand, has been working to systematically improve and rollout its live streaming capabilities through both its large scale media partnerships and a total revamp of its Periscope Producer Desktop streaming application. Twitter now has live shows featured daily, including a new linear push from Bloomberg called TicToc.
I expect Twitter to roll out a tiled page under the URL live.twitter.com, featuring live streams that are searchable from live.twitter.com, and also to roll out several other important features for live streamers.
Most notably will be the hope for Twitter to allow non-partner accounts to feature ads for upcoming live shows and allow users to set reminders and receive notifications when they go live. Twitter has always been the home for what’s happening right now, and they should become more of a live network in 2018.
The biggest problems we had in streaming in 2017 were standards related issues. Platforms constantly changed streaming specs and ranking algorithms for successful social streaming. I hope YouTube, Periscope and Facebook Live come together and create one set of standards to work across all platforms.
This doesn’t just have to do with encoding standards, but also to develop standards of how platform algorithms deal with descriptions, keywords and calls to action.
One of the pain points on Facebook Live right now is if their automated algorithm deems a video to have too much text or contain native advertising, they won’t allow you to boost it and will bury it below news feeds to ensure as few people as possible will see your video. What’s too much text? Well something as simple as a one line ticker at the bottom or even simple text-driven caption video can be marked and demoted in their algorithms and not allowed to be boosted for promotion.
This can be a huge issue for both creators and clients alike. These users are fully willing to buy into Facebook’s advertising model and pay to boost and promote posts with live video. But Facebook makes it harder and harder with every platform change.
Finally what we hope to see in 2018 from Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and Twitter, is a more human approach to combating fake news, spam, ContentID and any other types of unintended consequences of hosting user-generated video at scale. When I was at Livestream, we had a large NOC team of actual people monitoring the platform to pull down any content that violated our terms of use or copyright infringements.
Now I get it that monitoring that many facebook profiles at once is a near impossible task, but I think their can be a compromise to allow videos flagged for copyright, click bait, engagement bait, or fake news, that they then can go to a team of actual humans who can at least select items at random for a sanity check against their automated systems. There needs to be a differentiator between the bad and bordering criminal posts, and those of us who are just trying to do good work.
That’s it for Ready Take Live In Depth and What to Expect in 2018. We’d like to hear what you would like to see in 2018, and we’ll tell you what we think. Send us your questions and comments to @livexproduction, and you could be featured on the next episode of Ready Take Live.
