Facebook updates video features for live, Watch Party and Creator Studio

Facebook just released a batch of new updated features for its video platforms across Live, Watch Party and Creator Studio.

For Live, the company is adding rehearsals, trimming, extended duration, simulcasting via the Live API and global availability of Live on Facebook Lite. This means publishers can now broadcast a Live video only to Page admins and editors to test new production setups, interactive features and show formats in a rehearsal. The trimming feature allows publishers to get rid of any potentially awkward moments at the beginning or end of livestreams. The company has also lengthened the maximum duration of Live videos to 8 hours when broadcasting via the Live API.

For Watch Party, Facebook is adding scheduling, replay, new metrics, branded content and global availability of Live Commentating. Replays allow people to experience Watch Parties after they air. The two new metrics in Creator Studio for Watch Parties are minutes viewed and unique 60s viewers. Minutes viewed shows the total amount of watch time accrued in a Watch Party and unique 60s viewers shows the total number of unique users that watched at least 60 seconds in a Watch Party.

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For Creator Studio, the company has added a new visualization in Loyalty Insights, a new Distribution metric, 13 new languages for auto-captioning and the ability to publish and schedule content for Instagram Feed and IGTV. Facebook will begin showing which videos are driving returning viewers for a Page. The new metric gives a score to each video’s performance based on the Page’s historic average on a range of metrics that drive distribution, such as 1 minute views, average minutes watched and retention.

The new auto-captioning languages are Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, Italian, Malay, Russian, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese.