Facebook users, publishers and brands are engaging with Facebook Live in new ways. Live video is immediate and social, and Facebook data shows that “people comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos” driving reach and engagement which favours the live video format on the world’s largest social platform.

In a just a few months, Facebook Live has become a dominant force in the live video industry and many brands and broadcasters have improved their exposure and revenues thanks to this powerful tool.

Andy Murray, broke new ground last month becoming the first tennis star to stream a major match live on Facebook. The live stream of his inaugural charity event, Andy Murray Live, demonstrated Facebook’s potential as a streaming platform as his charity match scored more than 700,000 views and almost 20,000 interactions. The total audience for the two live streams from the event was over 1.2m viewers – a fantastic result.

Read more: First Facebook Live stream of a major tennis match demonstrates potential.

First Facebook Live stream of a major tennis match

It was great to work with Andy and his team to support this event:

“We made the decision to stream the Andy Murray Live event live on Facebook so that Andy’s fans worldwide would have the opportunity to engage with the event. We are also interested in driving innovation around the event and Andy’s social media channels and viewed this as a good platform to do that. By using Grabyo we were able to ensure there were no problems with the quality or performance of the live stream and the level of engagement was impressive.” (Matt Gentry, 77 Group).

We look forward to working with other rights holders and sports stars as we continue to develop our capabilities for Facebook Live.

The US presidential debate: streamed live on Facebook

Sports were not the only events streaming live on Facebook this month.

During the most recent US presidential debate NBC led the top 5 broadcast networks with 18.2 million viewers whilst Facebook live generated 55 million views of debate-related Facebook Live videos (18.6 million in the U.S.) – generating more than 73.8 million engagements from users ( e.g. likes, posts, comments and shares). This demonstrates the enormous potential of Facebook Live as one of biggest global channel for video content distribution. Source WSJ).

News organizations such as
ABC News, Fox News, AJ+, TIME, BuzzFeed, Cheddar, NBC News and Washington Post all used Facebook Live to broadcast the event.

The video from the WSJ below highlights some numbers from the 2016 US presidential debate compared to other media events:

Facebook Live: Opportunity for monetization

Our partnership with Facebook Live started just a few months ago when we announced Grabyo professional live streaming solution for Facebook at the developer conference F8 (April 2016). During the summer, we have shown how to generate millions of views on Facebook and recently we shared an update on how to generate new revenue with Facebook branded video. We are excited about the opportunity to support the growth of publishers using Facebook Live and to develop new propositions for brands and sponsor partners.

Sharing live streams on Facebook provides significant opportunities for monetisation. This can be achieved by adding graphics and branding to live streams and publishing events using a handshake tag.

You can watch a brief overview of how Facebook Live video streaming works within Grabyo by clicking on the video below: