SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has announced a set of partners for its livestreaming product. The company has opened up its live API, something that it plans on building out in the next five years.
Introduced in August, Facebook Live is the social networking company’s response to Meerkat and Periscope. The company has said that it places a premium on video content and thinks that its livestreaming tool will play a big role in its next growth phase. People from more than 60 countries have access to this service, which originally started out by being only available to celebrities and VIPs.
Last week, Facebook released a slew of updates in which it now allowed you to broadcast directly into Groups and Events, while also adding in Reactions, video filters, and new ways to discover other livestreams. It has also been prioritized to show higher within not only your News Feed, but also within trending topics.
Opening up access to its livestream product will likely give Facebook an additional edge as the live video space becomes more heated with the company competing against Twitter’s Periscope, which announced more than 200 million streams were done in a year, and also the soon-to-be-released YouTube Connect app from Google.
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