Is Facebook Really Where You Go to Watch?

Not all distribution deals are created equally.

Slide Widget

There is a genre of Internet news release that often starts, “Now users of [Web site X] have access to content from [Content Source Y]. These articles typically don’t dwell on the fact that any user of the Web site X could have surfed over to the many other places that Content Source Y’s stuff was already available. And thus they don’t deal with the question: Is Web site X a particularly good place to read or watch that stuff?

So Wednesday, we saw a slew of stories about how Slide, the hot Widget start-up, has arranged for video from Hulu, CBS and Warner Brothers on Facebook. It is part of a new Facebook application the company is working on FunSpace Channels that will be opened Thursday.

I don’t get it. Is the core of Facebook about consuming media? That’s always been the biggest difference between MySpace and Facebook. On MySpace, users are defining their personalities by programming their own collage of text, photos, music and video, blending work they created themselves with clips of professional work. When you are on MySpace you read about what your friends are doing, but at the same time you are listing to what they are listening to and watching what they are watching.

Facebook is all about person-to-person and person-to-small group communications. It is using your social connections to improve e-mail, not to improve television. I first met Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, in 2006 while I was working on an article on MySpace. He kept using the word “utility,” which is a phrase that doesn’t often come out of the mouth of Chris DeWolfe, his counterpart at MySpace.

When Facebook opened itself up to outside developers last year, it allowed its pages to have some of the cacophony of MySpace profiles. The recent redesign, which hides the outside applications on subordinate pages, reasserts the primacy of Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision of the site as a communication utility.

So what is the appeal of an application, buried inside Facebook, that lets users watch the latest hot clips from “Saturday Night Live” or “CSI”? I’ve got to believe that the vast majority of viewers will mainly watch media on sites that are oriented around watching, including the network’s own sites, and sites like YouTube and, yes, MySpace. When people who connect to their friends on Facebook find something they like, it is really quite easy to share it with their friends. They can paste links or embed video players into any number of applications, including Slide’s FunSpace, formerly FunWall.

These days, content owners have no reason not to allow their material on any service that has a plausible business deal. And for Slide, why not take that content, since it’s available, and try to get some extra page views (and PR buzz) from it. But just because you can do a deal that doesn’t hurt anyone doesn’t mean that the rest of us should have to pay attention.

O.K. Bits readers who use Facebook: Am I wrong? Do you love to watch Web video on Facebook?

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You are Not wrong.

You are wrong.

The collection of web sites people visit is shrinking. Not because we have less interests, but because consolidation allows me to do things on Facebook you used to do on Yahoo and YouTube. e.g. – Yahoo’s fantasy sports offering is still the best, but I would rather play my fantasy sports on Facebook (through Citizen Sports). You simply have less sites to keep track of and less passwords (plus, Yahoo is so washed up my fantasy sports don’t even load on the My Yahoo page – “Oops!”). When someone posts a YouTube video on Facebook, you can watch it there. Why navigate away if you don’t have to?

Websites want more page views, more clicks. I want less of both.

Silicon Valley Sally October 1, 2008 · 8:47 pm

Solid point industry watcher. If I could bank on Facebook, I would.

Where I prefer to watch TV shows online I don’t think I would watch them on facebook.

Sure, I love to watch videos on Facebook. I typically find worthwhile videos there since I can trust my friends/family network to flag content that would be interesting to me.

Well, funny videos from people are funny, but even those get hidden away now… I really agree with you: I don’t see the point to this endeavor

Nope, I usually read about it in some friend’s wall and then search for it in YouTube

Facebook is trying to be the new AOL. Not quite a walled garden since anyone can come & go at will, but a place that if “good enough” will keep people on a single site without having to navigate all over the Internet. Video is just one more reason to navigate away; if they can co-opt it then so much the better for them.

More eyeball time equals more ad dollars, simple as that.

I don’t think you are wrong, I think you need to examine it from another perspective. A Facebook video option is not going to replace the television, nor the need to surf/view videos on sites such as YouTube. What it IS going to do, is allow you to see what your friends are watching.

On the Facebook News Feed (which is the main page that users are directed to upon log-in, showing which one of their friends has had what activity on their page most recently), they are going to be able to see that some has posted a video for a show. Now, Facebook users that may have not been current fans of that show will have the ability to say “Well, if John is watching this show, maybe I’ll see what it is all about…” I don’t think Facebook is expecting people to sit and watch full shows. But even if that is the case, I’d probably watch.

It’s Hulu for Facebook (it takes advantage of the social graph); what’s not to get?

Currently no but if I could find and share them via Facebook then I will. Right now we just share clips that are hosted on YouTube since there is no good mechanism to find videos via Facebook.

Your article caught my attention because I recently have been ranting to my wife about the lack of utility thus far of any of the third party applications I have seen. I love social networking and have been a long-time fan of its value in extending ones professional visibility. Having been on Facebook for only a very brief time, I have already witnessed the value in re-connecting me with people. However, just short of the fundamental applications which define the site’s, there is a fine line between novelty and what I like to characterize as nothing more the ‘viral white noise’ which essentially characterizes the vast majority of the applications available.

More directly to your point, there is high value in being able to post a link or embed a YouTube video on somebody’s wall and by virtue of the friend activity, gaining visibility to something that would otherwise have not hit my radar.

The real question is whether somebody is using the site as a primary portal onto the world’s media sources, I believe that is without question, definitively ‘no.’ However, as people move about on the web, those things that tickle their fancy, things which they find provocative, and compelling, are most certainly referenced via this medium, thereby, establishing the site as a platform for information dissemination in a Web 2.0 world.

I so agree with you. I have both, myspace and facebook, I get on facebook when I feel like just talking to my friends, the other stuff? just leave it myspace and youtube.

I think that you are wrong. Facebook is a great way to connect to the world around you.

Facebook is great but not as a media hub. .

I don’t think it is a matter of being right or wrong. There must be a segment of people that are not accessing videos on Hulu etc. However there are millions of people on Facebook. Now these videos will reach a larger audience by using facebook as a communications utility. Facebook is a channel for communications just like television, radio and the internet in general.

The question isn’t – Do people want to watch videos on Facebook? It is – How many more people will watch our videos if they were on facebook?

Someone, somewhere thinks that alot more people will.

– Wm.

As a long-time Facebook user (since a couple months after the site went live), I am still surprised every time that I see video on Facebook. I forget that users can post their own video! I forget that there are people who actually use that function of Facebook! So when I saw the Slide announcement, it seemed rather odd to me that a company was looking to make a name as a video provider to Facebook. The whole thing just seems like the king of “who cares?” press releases (sorry, Slide!).

I disagree Saul. The video applet on FB is already a huge hit.

Just this week I posted a link to a clip of Couric’s interview with Palin on Facebook. It sparked a war of words between a childhood friend and a former business colleague of mine who don’t even know each other. I find it a lot more interesting to follow the zeitgeist of people I know, than to read random postings by anonymous sources on YouTube.

Yes I find it lovely to watch videos recommended by friend circle rather than some random 1000x people, and I especially love the poltical and funny videos and the comments that follow. FB is good for media consumption. I especially the three-four levels of privacy I can set while sharing my own videos on Facebook. On the other hand, they might just launch a subsidiary called FaceVideo.com

One-stop “shop” – In this day and age, we want it all, and we want it NOW; why go to multiple sites if we can find it all in a single site? Isn’t that what a “newspaper” used to be? – a single-source for ALL information?

Slide is still in the old school mindset “If you build it they will come”. That’s not how this works anymore. Web 2.0 has made it’s debut and that fresh new car scent has now been covered with body odor and city smell.

If you want to get a bunch of traffic to your site, you better figure out a way to monetize the damn thing. Do some sponsorships, get the community involved. Is anyone proud to have a Slide account like they would a Twitter or a Flickr? My guess would be no.

Ajay – You raise a good point that hasn’t occurred to me in all my Facebook video ponderings, which is that this Slide feature allows a larger volume of videos to be recommended by trusted friends. Then – as Raul notes – for your convenience these videos propagate in your news feed without any effort on your part. Let other people choose the videos you watch and make sure that they’re people you trust, I think would best sum up that concept. Still, I think I prefer the wild west experience of hunting down bizarre, un-referred videos on YouTube as opposed to having my virtual Facebook buddies tell me what they think is worth watching.

it all comes down to the interface. if facebook’s video runs faster and has a larger selection, then i would probably use it.

one reason (mostly young) people watch videos online (on sites such as youtube or facebook) is that there’s a huge constituency of college students who do not have access to real television. The college I attend has no television whatsoever, so we get all of our pop culture from the internet, including tv.

For videos I want to share or reference later, I post a YouTube link on my own wall.

Facebook is becoming the one stop shop to post links for all – videos, news articles, etc. I scan the News Feeds and Status Updates of friends each day for interesting tidbits. It becomes my own personal DIGG network.