The dark side of Facebook Live at DVinfo.net

Andrew Smith · March 7th, 2017, 01:28 AM

An article at the Wall Street Journal (see here) reveals a whole host of problems that Facebook is still wrestling with.

back at the beginning, executives were skeptical that everyday Facebookk users would use Live Streaming
from the trial "Seventy percent of the users were college- or high-school-aged, and a large number were African-American teenagers"
no ability to censor violence from streams, including the streaming of murders and suicides
After paying media companies and celebs to post using FB Live ($100M budget), "Nearly a year later, many publishers say Facebook Live viewership is lackluster."
Facebook is still trying to sort out how FB Live content generators can make money form the advertising
the anticipated flow of streamed wedding and holiday party video has not materialised

Andrew

Chris Harding · March 7th, 2017, 04:47 AM

Hi Andrew

On the social side (weddings and parties) Face Book are brutal about copyright music and you cannot tell a bride to turn off her entry song or a party DJ to stop playing the music so I'm not surprised that that has never taken off. Your stream would be dead in the water before it even happened and that wouldn't go down well with a bride getting married. Even YouTube will ping you if it detects music and we are talking here about ambient background music not music added to the stream. If you are a DJ and want to promote yourself or a live band playing covers the same thing will happen.

I think also that the ability for viewers to comment is an issue for producers as any idiot can post nasty comments to your video ..admittedly FB might take action days or weeks later but there is no active policing and I certainly wouldn't want a broadcast I'm doing for a bride to start getting abusive comments from some little snotty nosed kid "doing it for kicks" on the other side of the world.

Face Book is simply way too public to do any professional broadcasts ..it's great for a bunch of teens equipped with an iPhone or two ..that's about it!!

Josh Chesarek · March 8th, 2017, 01:22 PM

Yeah the copyright is killer even when working with events that have the rights. Even when I mic people up and it is at best a minor sound in the background you can get flagged and kicked off. Facebook and Youtube have always been supplemental streams in my setup and if they want them we get a guy who sits there to watch those ones for when something happens. I recently was asked about an event that wanted to include licenced music and game footage (from the game publisher) and I am now trying to figure out how to go through getting the channel or stream pre-approved so it doesn't get taken down mid stream. Fun times!

Craig Seeman · March 14th, 2017, 11:41 AM

Perhaps better to read it here if you're not a Wall Street Journal subscriber.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-...190500740.html

Craig Seeman · March 14th, 2017, 11:55 AM

I think Facebook live may be best used for Marketing purposes especially if your target demographic matches that of the typical Facebook viewer.

When I live stream it's often to a few social media sites at the same time. Facebook, Periscope (Twitter) and sometimes YouTube.

Andrew Smith · March 14th, 2017, 05:50 PM

This reminds me of something I really value about the Monarch HDX model, the ability to encode and send two independent streams out from the one source.

Andrew

David Barnett · March 16th, 2017, 06:57 AM

On a personal level I was at the gym a few months ago and someone on their decided to Facetime live while they were on the elliptical. Idiotic. There was nothing special about it, just saying "Hi Facebook. I'm at the gym" for about 2 minutes.

It was then I realized Facebook Live is going to absolutely ruin this society within 5 years.Hopefully, it's a losing venture either financially or PR wise, and they cancel the service. Otherwise, one way to 'improve it' would be to charge a nominal fee, just so people use it when they really, really feel they need to or for business/marketing purposes (local news).

As for weddings, yeah I hadn't thought of the comments feed but yeah that would be troubling. I imagine a setting of only 'friends' can comment should fix that issue, but in general I really don't see much of a market for people to 'watch a wedding live'. Aside from distant family, or friends who couldn't make it but wanted to.

I shoot local Jr Hockey & its amazing how far its come over the 6 years I've been doing it. It went from crappy SD feeds with RCA (red, yellow, white) cables where parents watched on their PC to now being in HD and a smart TV & OTT app. Drawback is the announcer occasionally receives texts from the parents about our coverage like we're not zoomed in enough, or when a fast play occurs where the puck went from behind the net in a scuffle, to being sent back to center ice if we missed part of the play. We just shake our heads.

Chris Harding · March 16th, 2017, 07:23 AM

Hi David

The live streaming of sports is an obvious choice as long as someone pays you for your time ..even junior sports have a big following.

At the moment around 90% of our weddings are live broadcast as the situation here is a lot different. We have a lot of people here who have parents and grandparents living in the UK and there is a huge population of people here from New Zealand with family over there. As flying over is often impractical they love a live video so I guess the market here is different. Our last New Zealand wedding had 600 people watching at times and they loved every minute.

We pay to stream to Livestream.com so every FaceBook/YouTube idiot is excluded, yes we also have a comments facility but that's for family only. The client gets a unique custom URL and custom event page for their stream so it's a lot different than the "free" pages.

I couldn't agree more that FaceBook live is more of a gimmick facility rather than a serious broadcast site and I see very little use for the serious producer ..It's great if you want to send a few minutes of stupid footage to the world from your iPhone but it's hardly a serious CDN at all.

David Barnett · March 16th, 2017, 05:58 PM

Oh I'm sure there's a market for it. A few years ago I had a Polish bride marry. Only thing is she didn't ask me until the day of, lol, if I could FaceTime it for her too (or Skype). I just wasn't ready nor did I really have the infrastructure for it. Anyway she was only asking and a family member used their Ipad to stream it to family back home, so it worked out.

Yes, it sounds like in your area it's very beneficial. I'm in Philadelphia, which isn't much of a transient town. People trickle in from central PA, NJ & NYC, but for the most part fairly local. Outside of the occasional sick family member, personally I don't have much of a market for it. I've consider dabbling into it more.

As for the youth hockey, yeah it pays. Pretty good in fact. It's thru a company HockeyTV, used to be Fasthockey. Anyway they've been doing it several years, I know since at least 2010 (I think I started 2012). I got the gig thru a friend who went back into TV News, but we're more or less thru the team. I think some coaches make their scratched players set it up and shoot but our coach doesn't wanna be bothered or know any of that stuff as he would say. So its worked out. The pay per game is modest but there's 2 teams (A & B) and in total there's about 30-40 home games. It's likely my last year doing it as I had a backup guy cover the B team, and the A games I couldn't make either due to weddings or a rare Friday game where at this point, I just can't take time off from work to cover much anymore.

Steven Digges · March 21st, 2017, 09:48 AM

I tried watching my first Face Book stream the other day. What a joke. The stream had been live the day before so I was looking at a recorded broadcast. Ironically I was trying to watch a conference about streaming put on by an AV magazine about integrating AV and IT. It made them look outright stupid.

Here they were showing how they were broadcasting the stream and I could not get it to sync. I am not talking about a couple of frames I am talking about it getting minutes off between audio and video. Really bizarre stuff. It had to be on the Face Book side of things. Pausing to buffer would not even change anything. The feed got off and there was nothing I could do on my end. These were supposed to be streaming professionals and they looked like amateurs!

In their defense I think they may have also been streaming off of another server simultaneously but included a Face Book feed so I tried that. Big mistake. And their production value was not that good considering who they were and the topic. It looked like a in-house AV gig to me. They would cut in late and lost the audio feed completely a few times. I think that part was on their end. I also saw the good old title slide go up several times when the guy on the switch needed his safety to go to. Been there, done that a few times over the years.

If it would have been one of my clients and I had their quality issues I would be in big trouble! And I don't mean just the Face Book sync......

Steve

Steven Digges · March 21st, 2017, 10:15 AM

I just tried watching it again because I wanted to hear this presentation. First there is no presenter audio for the first 30 seconds. That is most often the guy on the switcher blowing it (Rowland V50 w/audio mixer) by forgetting to bring up gain. ALWAYS monitor your broadcast on your own end user device. Then 4 minutes in they loose audio again for at least 30 seconds and when it comes back it starts over at the beginning of the presentation! That is why it is off by minutes. This is not the way to stream and they are supposed to be pros demonstrating it!

Link: scroll down to Day 2 morning Session: https://www.facebook.com/avtechnologymag/?fref=ts

Steve

Seth Bloombaum · March 21st, 2017, 10:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Digges

ALWAYS monitor your broadcast on your own end user device.

^^^^^^^
This!!!!

Those of us who have survived the school of hard knocks have taken in this lesson, and taken it in well! Audio/Video engineers would call this confidence monitoring. If you don't know how your stream looked to an end-viewer, how will you ever survive when something *does* go wrong. It will, and you'll be challenged to say whether this affected all streams. You've got to know!

Steven Digges · March 21st, 2017, 09:52 PM

Absolutely true Seth! You must monitor your end result, including the audio. When you are the one in charge of that broadcast you can never say "It looked good when it left the truck." No one would know what you are talking about and now you are the one responsible for the signal all the way to every viewer. Your client does not know what a CDN is and should never care or have to know. It is your signal and you own it until everyone can see and hear it.

Steve

Charlie Steiner · April 4th, 2017, 12:44 PM

I've had incredibly positive experiences with FB Live. I work for a community radio station in new orleans, and we do a lot of live music streams. this is mostly with professional cameras going through a tricaster. we get thousands of views of almost anything we do, and for better known musicians, it goes to tens of thousands. highest for a live stream was 45k, which went a lot higher in the following days. seems that the great majority of viewers are NOT people who were listening to the radio at the time, but just FB followers, who got notification via FB that we were live. its been great at expanding our audience, especially through sharing. our highest FB audience was not live, but a 10minute observational doc of pete fountain's funeral procession that garnered 185k views. on mardi gras, I had 5 people around the city doing live streams -- from their phones, and they were largely successful, even with huge use of 4G by millions of visitors. a 1 minute live stream of a new mardi gras indian group had 45k views, from a phone. I should add that we are streaming to Livestream, which pushes it to Facebook. my unscientific observation is that we get more stable streams on FB that way than going direct to FB.

Chris Harding · April 4th, 2017, 06:57 PM

The biggest issue on FaceBook seems to be the music copyright issue so maybe streaming to Livestream initially makes a difference? Try uploading a short video to FB that contains a popular commercial song and it gets pinged instantly BUT if you post a link on FB to a video from another source it displays the preview and viewers can click on it and FB doesn't look at it as a copyright infringement.

Since we do a lot of weddings and they have music content, FB Live is not a practical solution but admittedly I have never tried it thru Livestream!!

March 7th, 2017, 01:28 AM	#1
Andrew Smith Equal Opportunity Offender Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Brisbane, Australia Posts: 3,065	The dark side of Facebook Live An article at the Wall Street Journal (see here) reveals a whole host of problems that Facebook is still wrestling with. back at the beginning, executives were skeptical that everyday Facebookk users would use Live Streaming from the trial "Seventy percent of the users were college- or high-school-aged, and a large number were African-American teenagers" no ability to censor violence from streams, including the streaming of murders and suicides After paying media companies and celebs to post using FB Live ($100M budget), "Nearly a year later, many publishers say Facebook Live viewership is lackluster." Facebook is still trying to sort out how FB Live content generators can make money form the advertising the anticipated flow of streamed wedding and holiday party video has not materialised Andrew

March 7th, 2017, 04:47 AM	#2
Chris Harding Inner Circle Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Perth, Western Australia Posts: 8,441	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Hi Andrew On the social side (weddings and parties) Face Book are brutal about copyright music and you cannot tell a bride to turn off her entry song or a party DJ to stop playing the music so I'm not surprised that that has never taken off. Your stream would be dead in the water before it even happened and that wouldn't go down well with a bride getting married. Even YouTube will ping you if it detects music and we are talking here about ambient background music not music added to the stream. If you are a DJ and want to promote yourself or a live band playing covers the same thing will happen. I think also that the ability for viewers to comment is an issue for producers as any idiot can post nasty comments to your video ..admittedly FB might take action days or weeks later but there is no active policing and I certainly wouldn't want a broadcast I'm doing for a bride to start getting abusive comments from some little snotty nosed kid "doing it for kicks" on the other side of the world. Face Book is simply way too public to do any professional broadcasts ..it's great for a bunch of teens equipped with an iPhone or two ..that's about it!!

March 8th, 2017, 01:22 PM	#3
Josh Chesarek Major Player Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Winter Park, FL Posts: 978	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Yeah the copyright is killer even when working with events that have the rights. Even when I mic people up and it is at best a minor sound in the background you can get flagged and kicked off. Facebook and Youtube have always been supplemental streams in my setup and if they want them we get a guy who sits there to watch those ones for when something happens. I recently was asked about an event that wanted to include licenced music and game footage (from the game publisher) and I am now trying to figure out how to go through getting the channel or stream pre-approved so it doesn't get taken down mid stream. Fun times! __________________ Simple Thought Productions - Life @ 30,000 Words per second

March 14th, 2017, 11:41 AM	#4
Craig Seeman Inner Circle Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA Posts: 3,841	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Perhaps better to read it here if you're not a Wall Street Journal subscriber. https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-...190500740.html

March 14th, 2017, 11:55 AM	#5
Craig Seeman Inner Circle Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA Posts: 3,841	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live I think Facebook live may be best used for Marketing purposes especially if your target demographic matches that of the typical Facebook viewer. When I live stream it's often to a few social media sites at the same time. Facebook, Periscope (Twitter) and sometimes YouTube.

March 14th, 2017, 05:50 PM	#6
Andrew Smith Equal Opportunity Offender Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Brisbane, Australia Posts: 3,065	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live This reminds me of something I really value about the Monarch HDX model, the ability to encode and send two independent streams out from the one source. Andrew

March 16th, 2017, 06:57 AM	#7
David Barnett Major Player Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Philly, PA Posts: 951	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live On a personal level I was at the gym a few months ago and someone on their decided to Facetime live while they were on the elliptical. Idiotic. There was nothing special about it, just saying "Hi Facebook. I'm at the gym" for about 2 minutes. It was then I realized Facebook Live is going to absolutely ruin this society within 5 years.Hopefully, it's a losing venture either financially or PR wise, and they cancel the service. Otherwise, one way to 'improve it' would be to charge a nominal fee, just so people use it when they really, really feel they need to or for business/marketing purposes (local news). As for weddings, yeah I hadn't thought of the comments feed but yeah that would be troubling. I imagine a setting of only 'friends' can comment should fix that issue, but in general I really don't see much of a market for people to 'watch a wedding live'. Aside from distant family, or friends who couldn't make it but wanted to. I shoot local Jr Hockey & its amazing how far its come over the 6 years I've been doing it. It went from crappy SD feeds with RCA (red, yellow, white) cables where parents watched on their PC to now being in HD and a smart TV & OTT app. Drawback is the announcer occasionally receives texts from the parents about our coverage like we're not zoomed in enough, or when a fast play occurs where the puck went from behind the net in a scuffle, to being sent back to center ice if we missed part of the play. We just shake our heads.

March 16th, 2017, 07:23 AM	#8
Chris Harding Inner Circle Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Perth, Western Australia Posts: 8,441	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Hi David The live streaming of sports is an obvious choice as long as someone pays you for your time ..even junior sports have a big following. At the moment around 90% of our weddings are live broadcast as the situation here is a lot different. We have a lot of people here who have parents and grandparents living in the UK and there is a huge population of people here from New Zealand with family over there. As flying over is often impractical they love a live video so I guess the market here is different. Our last New Zealand wedding had 600 people watching at times and they loved every minute. We pay to stream to Livestream.com so every FaceBook/YouTube idiot is excluded, yes we also have a comments facility but that's for family only. The client gets a unique custom URL and custom event page for their stream so it's a lot different than the "free" pages. I couldn't agree more that FaceBook live is more of a gimmick facility rather than a serious broadcast site and I see very little use for the serious producer ..It's great if you want to send a few minutes of stupid footage to the world from your iPhone but it's hardly a serious CDN at all.

March 16th, 2017, 05:58 PM	#9
David Barnett Major Player Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Philly, PA Posts: 951	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Oh I'm sure there's a market for it. A few years ago I had a Polish bride marry. Only thing is she didn't ask me until the day of, lol, if I could FaceTime it for her too (or Skype). I just wasn't ready nor did I really have the infrastructure for it. Anyway she was only asking and a family member used their Ipad to stream it to family back home, so it worked out. Yes, it sounds like in your area it's very beneficial. I'm in Philadelphia, which isn't much of a transient town. People trickle in from central PA, NJ & NYC, but for the most part fairly local. Outside of the occasional sick family member, personally I don't have much of a market for it. I've consider dabbling into it more. As for the youth hockey, yeah it pays. Pretty good in fact. It's thru a company HockeyTV, used to be Fasthockey. Anyway they've been doing it several years, I know since at least 2010 (I think I started 2012). I got the gig thru a friend who went back into TV News, but we're more or less thru the team. I think some coaches make their scratched players set it up and shoot but our coach doesn't wanna be bothered or know any of that stuff as he would say. So its worked out. The pay per game is modest but there's 2 teams (A & B) and in total there's about 30-40 home games. It's likely my last year doing it as I had a backup guy cover the B team, and the A games I couldn't make either due to weddings or a rare Friday game where at this point, I just can't take time off from work to cover much anymore.

March 21st, 2017, 09:48 AM	#10
Steven Digges Trustee Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 1,828	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live I tried watching my first Face Book stream the other day. What a joke. The stream had been live the day before so I was looking at a recorded broadcast. Ironically I was trying to watch a conference about streaming put on by an AV magazine about integrating AV and IT. It made them look outright stupid. Here they were showing how they were broadcasting the stream and I could not get it to sync. I am not talking about a couple of frames I am talking about it getting minutes off between audio and video. Really bizarre stuff. It had to be on the Face Book side of things. Pausing to buffer would not even change anything. The feed got off and there was nothing I could do on my end. These were supposed to be streaming professionals and they looked like amateurs! In their defense I think they may have also been streaming off of another server simultaneously but included a Face Book feed so I tried that. Big mistake. And their production value was not that good considering who they were and the topic. It looked like a in-house AV gig to me. They would cut in late and lost the audio feed completely a few times. I think that part was on their end. I also saw the good old title slide go up several times when the guy on the switch needed his safety to go to. Been there, done that a few times over the years. If it would have been one of my clients and I had their quality issues I would be in big trouble! And I don't mean just the Face Book sync...... Steve __________________ www.CorporateShow.com Been at this so long I'm rounding my years of experience down...not up! Last edited by Steven Digges; March 21st, 2017 at 11:11 AM.

March 21st, 2017, 10:15 AM	#11
Steven Digges Trustee Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 1,828	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live I just tried watching it again because I wanted to hear this presentation. First there is no presenter audio for the first 30 seconds. That is most often the guy on the switcher blowing it (Rowland V50 w/audio mixer) by forgetting to bring up gain. ALWAYS monitor your broadcast on your own end user device. Then 4 minutes in they loose audio again for at least 30 seconds and when it comes back it starts over at the beginning of the presentation! That is why it is off by minutes. This is not the way to stream and they are supposed to be pros demonstrating it! Link: scroll down to Day 2 morning Session: https://www.facebook.com/avtechnologymag/?fref=ts Steve __________________ www.CorporateShow.com Been at this so long I'm rounding my years of experience down...not up!

March 21st, 2017, 09:52 PM	#13
Steven Digges Trustee Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 1,828	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live Absolutely true Seth! You must monitor your end result, including the audio. When you are the one in charge of that broadcast you can never say "It looked good when it left the truck." No one would know what you are talking about and now you are the one responsible for the signal all the way to every viewer. Your client does not know what a CDN is and should never care or have to know. It is your signal and you own it until everyone can see and hear it. Steve __________________ www.CorporateShow.com Been at this so long I'm rounding my years of experience down...not up!

April 4th, 2017, 12:44 PM	#14
Charlie Steiner Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: New Orleans, LA Posts: 66	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live I've had incredibly positive experiences with FB Live. I work for a community radio station in new orleans, and we do a lot of live music streams. this is mostly with professional cameras going through a tricaster. we get thousands of views of almost anything we do, and for better known musicians, it goes to tens of thousands. highest for a live stream was 45k, which went a lot higher in the following days. seems that the great majority of viewers are NOT people who were listening to the radio at the time, but just FB followers, who got notification via FB that we were live. its been great at expanding our audience, especially through sharing. our highest FB audience was not live, but a 10minute observational doc of pete fountain's funeral procession that garnered 185k views. on mardi gras, I had 5 people around the city doing live streams -- from their phones, and they were largely successful, even with huge use of 4G by millions of visitors. a 1 minute live stream of a new mardi gras indian group had 45k views, from a phone. I should add that we are streaming to Livestream, which pushes it to Facebook. my unscientific observation is that we get more stable streams on FB that way than going direct to FB.

April 4th, 2017, 06:57 PM	#15
Chris Harding Inner Circle Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Perth, Western Australia Posts: 8,441	Re: The dark side of Facebook Live The biggest issue on FaceBook seems to be the music copyright issue so maybe streaming to Livestream initially makes a difference? Try uploading a short video to FB that contains a popular commercial song and it gets pinged instantly BUT if you post a link on FB to a video from another source it displays the preview and viewers can click on it and FB doesn't look at it as a copyright infringement. Since we do a lot of weddings and they have music content, FB Live is not a practical solution but admittedly I have never tried it thru Livestream!!