Facebook has globally launched a new feature called Watch, giving users a new way to discover videos on the platform. While the feature has been available to the US for a little while, the company has made it accessible to everyone today.
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According to a blog post published this morning, the new tab – which you should now be able to access via the bottom of the Facebook app – will make it easier to “see which videos your friends have liked or shared, creating shows that have audience participation at their core, and opening Watch to videos from Pages,” it reads. I guess you could say it’s a lot like the Explore tab on Instagram, which Facebook also owns.
In the US, where the feature has been live for about 12 months, it draws more than 50 million viewers per month for at least a minute. Head of marketing at Facebook ANZ, Alex Sloane, says the team wanted to test Watch and its various video formats there before making it global.
“Mobile video is exploding, so absolutely it’s a big step for us,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “This is really about social videos, so this idea of video content that is not about passively consuming, but more about bringing community together around the content that they love.”
“We think we’re gonna see the emergence of really exciting formats that actually encourage people to connect and engage with each other, with their friends, but also to connect fans and creators and publishers more directly.”
Like Instagram Explore, Watch is tailored to each individual’s tastes using an algorithm. In terms of how it works in a general sense, new videos will be served to you based on what the platform thinks you’ll enjoy, which is primarily “driven by pages you follow,” Sloane said. On top of video discovery, Watch will also keep track of videos you might start watching in the news feed so that you can come back to them later. “It’s really your personalised mobile video channel and in a sense, we’re opening up 16 million personalised video channels in Australia.”
Of course, more ways to access videos on Facebook brings up the ever-lingering concern around the promotion of questionable content, whether it’s fake news, graphic scenes, or similar. Sloane says that content promoted through Watch will be held to a higher standard than the news feed.
“We have even higher thresholds that we hold the video content to,” she said. “If your video content has been pulled down because of content violations, for example, clickbait, IP, copyright issues, then your page’s videos will no longer be surfaced into Watch.”
Facebook is also aiming to work with content creators and give them the tools needed to “monetise and build a business,” Sloane said.
How Watch will fare here in Australia is uncertain, but given the upward trend in video consumption on the platform, particularly in terms of mobile, it has the potential to change the way users consume video content.
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