
Is Facebook Ready to Be the World’s Live News Network? - petethomas
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-14/is-facebook-ready-to-be-the-world-s-live-news-network
======
aantix
What's nice about Facebook Live (and Periscope) is that in tense situations,
the authorities could confiscate the phone but the video has already been sent
server side, so there's no way to suppress the footage. With the recent
streamed shooting in Minnesota, transparency into such events has just been
opened up a little more for all of us.

While a lot of the HN crowd hates on Facebook, the Minnesota shooting and
Dallas shooting have been eye opening and it's easy to see streaming video as
the next great equalizer.

Obviously Facebook could start suppressing contentious video, but so far
they've seemed to be pretty liberal and that's probably a separate issue. At
least the technology is in place so that people can open up to the
possibilities and other parallel platforms can be built if Facebook drops the
ball on content policy.

~~~
jswny
Totally agree. I love the idea in concept, I'm just quite wary of Facebook
being the place that implements it.

~~~
aantix
It's a hard problem. If you prioritize everything, say some decentralized
source, it becomes a shit show of junk where it's impossible to discern what
is relevant.

If we curate, then we're at the mercy of the curator's judgement and personal
interests.

~~~
spb
You say that like it's impossible to decentralize curation.

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mark_l_watson
My god, what a bad idea. The concentration of power in controlling what news
people see is one of the huge problems of modern times.

Personally, I like following a few diverse news feeds on Gnu Social, and if a
story interests me, then go on google news and read a story from a few sources
in different countries. I live in the USA and our news is very much
controlled/censored.

~~~
dudul
I also live in the US, but migrated there only 7 years ago. And, the news is
one of the things that shocked me the most. They are not news, they are echo-
chambers designed to please viewers and sell time slots to ad-publishers.

Every single story has to be sensational, has to be "crazy", or
"unbelievable". Everything has to be a show with music, sound effects and cool
teasers.

~~~
blakesterz
That's interesting, I never thought about what news might be like elsewhere.
It's better in other countries? I guess I just kind of assume it's like this
everywhere. (this may make me sound like an ignorant American, but honestly
I've no idea what the news is like everywhere else, I barely follow it here
for dudul's exact reasons)

~~~
speps
Try this :
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio](http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio)

You don't have images, but you'd surprised how many things happen in the world
at once...

~~~
soundwave106
Agreed. BBC World News is also available on some cable networks apparently
([https://bbcnewschannelfinder.com/](https://bbcnewschannelfinder.com/)).

(Live streams also exist, both "unofficially", and legally but geo-restricted
on Livestation, apparently.)

PBS and NPR are the only American sources on TV I considered fairly comparable
in tone and depth to news programs in other countries.

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herbst
How would a closed platform fit into this?

Everytime i happen to land on a facebook link literally half of the screen is
used by some penetrant ad that suggests that i should register for facebook
and does not let me close it, and thats just the public links, most links are
not even public so i just see a login screen.

I don't see how such a closed environment would have any meaning for news.

Edit:// Looking at the article the example makes it even worse. Wasnt that
video censored away not even 24 hours after it happened? Again how would such
a platform fit the phrase "news" in any way?

~~~
ianbicking
But it's a more open platform than the alternatives, with live posting there
are practically no gatekeepers, and it's hard take things back - cell phone
videos that aren't published are much more likely to be suppressed, or have
their release delayed reducing the sense of public urgency. A few ads on the
screen don't change the impact.

~~~
herbst
I too think that Twitter would fit this niche perfectly with their live stream
environment that also works as expected with higher loads and the way that
nobody gets forced to register just to consume.

I also don't see how news work where those who post the most (usually those
with the weakest quality) are ranked better than anyone else. Their current
platform/algo is simply not suiteable for such things.

I don't see how Facebook provides any benefit other than live streaming, what
is not exactly rocket science.

------
teekq
News today is such a waste of time. Live news is an even bigger waste.

The reporting, the outrage, the novelty, the opinions are all so over the top
one would think, the lack of value produced would actually cause the entire
news system to fall apart.

But instead I see more and more people just jumping in to prop these models of
outrage, unqualified opinion, celebrity culture and worship up. Its all very
sickening.

~~~
ikeyany
It does not seem like things will change until the masses (especially those
with money and influence) reject such low standards and demand something
better. Any ideas? I'm thinking something along the lines of intellectuals and
entertainers forming a coalition along some hard-to-define shared interests.

Those interests are so hard to define because success in the modern era
_depends_ on such sensationalism.

~~~
teekq1
I think something is required to drive home the point to people who don't know
better what a waste of time all this stuff is.

Even sites like hacker news (where you would think things can be different)
seem to send a signal that if you don't check us out everyday you are missing
stuff.

Nobody really needs to be checking hackernews everyday. Seriously. But for
some reason we have this need too. And there is no reason to feed that need.
Especially when it wastes everyones time. Even when there is something
interesting on here, I feel my time being wasted wading through ever
increasing unnecessary commentary. I'd like to see a system that deletes 80%
of commentary just like StackOverflow works. If you don't know what you are
talking about there should be a separate space for that. Probably IRC or a
chat room.

I also don't like these karma and upvote/downvote systems that every news
related site seems obligated to implement. The kind of people who fixate on
these numbers also turn into the biggest contributors on these sites. And
that's artificial and doesn't reflect society at all.

~~~
saurik
Sites like Hacker News actually do force you to check every day as there is no
way to see the content from previous days. Technically the content exists, but
it becomes noise as the actual value of the site is the ranking that lets me
see what people were interested in, not the raw list of all stories, and the
ranking is live and "rots" over time.

~~~
leesalminen
This is no longer true. A new feature release [0] now allows you to view page
1 of HN for a given date.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

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hanklazard
I've been wondering: can Facebook prevent news media from rebroadcasting their
Facebook Live videos? It seems that currently news outlets can rebroadcast as
they like, but if this could changed legally, it seems FB could extract
subscription fees from news networks to use their video. This type of scenario
would cement FBL as a core service for TV news and could be a nice recurring
revenue stream for FB--at least until traditional TV news disappears
completely (no tears shed here).

~~~
gruez
Probably not, unless they add a clause in their ToS saying they have an
exclusive licence to whatever is uploaded to Facebook live. I don't think
they'll do that though because everyone will be up in arms about it.

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pamelabuck
Yeah bad bad bad news. Anti trust already have prob regulating media co
mergers and media cos are not super smart. FB having this kind of power...
shudder

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suhith
The amount of engineering that has gone into this is incredible.

It's true Facebook is poised to become a huge source of news and information
sharing. It would be great if they could release clear guidelines regarding
the type of content allowed on Facebook Live, however doing so might reduce
their control as they'd have to answer to those very guidelines.

~~~
krschultz
[https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards](https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards)

~~~
suhith
Completely forgot about those. Thanks

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cloudjacker
Are news networks ready to change their news reporting format? I am seriously
too impatient for it when live to the point news and 10 second to the point
snaps are available

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hobo_mark
Facebook no, Twitter could have been, but they focused on stickers and magic
ponies instead of solving discoverability.

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jsprogrammer
>so there's no way to suppress the footage

What? I tried to watch one of the videos through a FB link (linked from HN)
and FB returned a page saying the video was gone. FB is not anti-censorship;
what makes you think that they are?

Hmm: HN bug. Why did this comment go under the root post instead if the
comment I replied to?

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nickbauman
The news people I know are all saying this now.

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davidf18
iOS 10 will have immediate direct video transmission built-in.

